NEW YORK, NEW YORK–(Marketwire – Aug. 3, 2010) – The Canadian Symposium for Parental Alienation Syndrome, (www.cspas.ca), today announced that their upcoming Annual Conference will take place in NYC. The conference is titled “Parental Alienation Syndrome: Past Present and Future”. Many consider this conference to be a landmark event in the history of mental health, in part because the American Psychiatric Association is now giving consideration to Parental Alienation Disorder (P.A.D.) for inclusion in the next edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, more often referred to as the DSM-5. There are some countries around the world that already recognize Parental Alienation as a diagnostic condition. As a recent example of this global shift, Spain’s Psychological Association did so in 2008.

“P.A.D. is a widespread disorder that is little understood and warrants serious study and attention by the mental health and legal community.”, states Dr. Amy J. Baker, a highly respected researcher in the field of parental alienation and the author of peer reviewed articles and books on the subject.”Inclusion of P.A.D. in the A.P.A.’s diagnostic book will go a long way towards creating awareness and helping children and families affected by this disorder.”

Parental Alienation Disorder has been defined as a mental condition in which a child, usually one whose parents are engaged in a high conflict divorce, allies himself or herself strongly with one parent, (the preferred parent), and rejects a relationship with the other parent, (the alienated parent), without legitimate justification. The child’s maladaptive behavior & refusal to see one of the parents is driven by the false belief that the alienated parent is a dangerous or an unworthy person.

The C.S.P.A.S conference will take place in NYC on October 2nd and 3rd at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in the Stern Auditorium. This conference is specifically geared towards the interests of mental health and family law professionals, but is also open to the general public. To register for this conference you can visit the C.S.P.A.S. website at http://www.cspas.ca

“We expect approximately 600 mental health professionals to register and attend the conference and of course everyone has a common interest in updating their clinical understanding of parental alienation because of so many new patients being referred for treatment.” stated Founder of the C.S.P.A.S. – Joseph Goldberg at a recent press conference.

In 2009 the C.S.P.A.S conference made headlines around the globe including the front page of the National Post Newspaper, Canada’s most widely circulated national daily publication. To register for this groundbreaking event, or learn more about C.S.P.A.S. please visit http://www.cspas.ca or call call 647-476-3170.

About C.S.P.A.S

Founded in 2008 by Joseph Goldberg, The Canadian Symposium for Parental Alienation Syndrome is an educational organization assisting mental health professionals, family law lawyers, family mediators and other professionals to better understand parental alienation and parental alienation syndrome / disorder. Their goal is to assist children and families in need of educational information and referrals to professionals with a specialized expertise for counseling, psychological or psycho-educational services. Parents and professionals in both the family law and mental health communities will be able to locate a number of experts in parental alienation by simply visiting their website. C.S.P.A.S also disseminates information and literature to professionals and to parents. They maintain a strictly educational position and have no political affiliations. The C.S.P.A.S. does not accept funding from any organization affiliated with parental rights, nor do they take a position in favor of or in opposition to equal parenting. For more information visit http://www.cspas.ca.

Living On The Outside Looking In

In today’s society, nearly half of children are being born to single mothers. Combine this with the high rate of divorce and a parent (usually the father) ends up on the outside looking in, wondering what is happening with his children. His access to them is limited and controlled, either by the court, or by the mother. For this reason, access rights need to be defined clearly to avoid later issues arising as to whether a certain day, weekend, or holiday belongs to one parent or the other.

What Needs To Be Known

On the following pages, you will find information on:

What Parents Need To Discuss On Access Rights;

Sample Visitation Schedule;

Sample Long Distance Visitation Schedule;

How To Address Denial Of Access;

Collecting Evidence Of Denial Of Access For The Courts;

GrandParent Access Rights;

Child Refusing To Visit;

You will learn that hiring an attorney is not necessarily a first step to address denial of access. Many state or local governments have developed procedures for enforcing visitation orders. In addition, the Federal government has made funding available to states for developing model programs to ensure that children will be able to have the continuing care and emotional support of both parents. Check with your local CSE agency and clerk of court to see what resources are available to you and to find out about laws that address custody and visitation.

Denial of access is a major problem, even with court orders in place. According to the US Dept. of Health & Human Services study, “Survey of Absent Parents” over 60% of mothers regularly violates the access rights of fathers, cutting off all contact between the children and their fathers within five years. Unlike child support, mothers are not jailed, even with multiple Contempt of Court ruling against them for violating the father’s court ordered visitation rights. However, Michigan has recently passed a law to limit the driving privileges of a custodial parent violating the access orders.

The best way to address repeated denial of access rights is to have the court order the offending parent to provide the court with a cash or certified bond that is forfeited if the orders are again violated.

An estimated 56 percent of abusers of all kinds are women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The most common form,. psychological abuse, can be as damaging as physical abuse.

In June it will be four years since Athena’s last ‘visitation’ with her father. We made a ‘legacy video’ that time. I asked Athena questions and she answered them. I still have the video. We laughed and talked and she held our dog close to her face telling the camera that Gracie was her favorite pet. Little did we know that months later she would be sitting in the basement of a quack psychologist’s home, drawing a picture on the white board of our family and dog, begging in her own subconscience mind to be rescued from what was about to happen. Hypnosis followed… then stronger drugs…. brainwashing… bribery… and then she began accusing her father of molesting her from age 3 to 13. Today we are without a bank account because of the fight to save her. The fight was fruitless. Parental alienation is nasty, and if you are not a public figure with lots of money like Alec Baldwin… forget it. It’s just a story you tell. A sad, true story.

The term “splitting” refers to a familiar tactic often used by children to manipulate their parents — if Mommy says, “No.”, then go ask Daddy.

For parent couples in the throes of separation or divorce, the adult version of splitting — largely characterized by one parent vilifying the other in order to manipulate the children into choosing sides and, ultimately, alienating the other parent from them — can be much more insidious.

The children may, at first, be only pawns — tools for gaining some sense of leverage or perceived control — but, in due course, they can become nothing more than weapons of vengeance, unwitting victims of ego and arrogance.

We are not alone in our relationship, nor is our partner. Establishing any relationship is an act of social co-creation in which all parties must be both responsible to, and accountable for, their actions, inactions and the consequences held therein. To that point, a relationship – any relationship — demands cultivation; it doesn’t just happen.xxxx

Related Articles

Should a relationship break, it is vital that both parties step back, take a moment to examine their personal role in that break, and hold onto that self-revelation. When the break is something not mutually agreed upon, the “wronged partner” – a term used quite loosely here – in denial and ignorance of their own responsibility, will often attempt to exercise some means for regaining a perceived semblance of control.

When benign, these means can appear as gestures of reconciliation, promises of change, pleas to seek counseling and all manner of self-effacing behavior. In instances more menacing, money is hidden; credit cards cancelled; documents disappear; cell phones are checked; computers scoured and private detectives hired, even when there is nothing to detect. A pattern of latent abuse [1, 2] emerges, escalating from a point somewhat removed from normal, to one that veers dangerously close to pathological.

These efforts to regain control are often fruitless; mostly because they are generally an illusion in the first place. Their abject futility, however, can foster a further, even more ominous, escalation – the co-opting of social connections. Friends, family, co-workers – anyone who will listen to the spinning of fantastical yarns that describe the evils of the other is approached, for good, ill or indifference.

Couched within this drama of social distortion, the saddest moment of all can come when an otherwise reasonable adult utters to a child fateful words that might go something like, “I don’t want a divorce. This is all your mother’s idea. She’s just a selfish bitch.” In that moment, in an ego-driven and one way war of wills, the child becomes so much collateral damage.

The mechanism of parental alienation is fueled by a gross failure of emotional intelligence, and further compelled by the anger and resentment of ego. It is roundly destructive to everyone involved; disrupting or destroying familial connections, rending the fabric of the post-marital relationship and effectively compromising any chance at successful co-parenting.

Indeed, the most oppressive aspect of parental alienation is that it creates a false issue — or set of false issues — for children whom it is very likely do not have the social or emotional intelligence to discriminate between fact and fancy. The inaccuracies and misinformation proffered by one parent in service of discrediting the other shakes the very foundations of a child’s model of the world, leaving them stranded outside the bounds of the very structure and consistency upon which they thrive.

Children caught up in this system of abuse [1, 2] are subject to a campaign of unjustified and unjustifiable denigration focused on one parent and perpetrated by the other. In mild cases, there is some programming fostered on the part of the alienating parent, but, all in all, relationships remain intact.

In moderate cases of parental alienation, the level of programming escalates, introducing two artifacts – firstly, the relationship with the targeted parent is more disrupted, created anxiety for the kids and, second, the children become co-opted into the alienating parent’s system of unjustified accusation and begin to believe it, causing a whole separate set of psychosocial issues for them.

In severe cases, the programming has taken hold and the child/children come to develop an irrational and unfounded hatred of the targeted parent, often disrupting the parent/child bond to the point of breaking.

While this all sounds like a horribly Machiavellian system of social pathology – and, at its worst, it is — some space needs to be held for the unintentional or naïve alienation fostered by simple resentment and frustration. Snarky remarks about financial matters, living arrangements or general behavior not personally directed at the other parent constitute a sort of indirect and somewhat unintentional alienation that a child may or may not take to heart.

A more active, and destructive, form of this is compassed by critical comments that remind a child about past disappointments or situations that had negative outcomes. It might also include more personal attacks on character, or descriptions of alleged (and typically false) activities that would reflect on character.

In severe cases, attempts at alienation are obsessive and irrational. The alienating parent literally subjugates the child, enmeshing them in their own irrational belief system and making it virtually impossible for them to think for themselves. The child is interjected into the social reality of the targeted parent as the mouthpiece of hatred for the alienating parent and, objectified in this way, becomes nothing more – and nothing less – than a weapon of social and emotional destruction.

The take away here is fairly straightforward — if we can’t figure out how to be married, fine, but, with children involved, we need to figure out how to be divorced; and certainly not at the expense of the children’s state of mind simply for our own small, petty and vindictive satisfactions.

So, play nice — and if you see this happening or catch yourself doing it, either speak up, or knock it off. In the end, it serves no one and the only ones who suffer are the kids.

Several brilliant expositions have been written about the complex web of lies and corruption that have been inserted insidiously into America through such Acts as VAWA, the Family Law and Child support agencies working in turn through an unholy alliance between Federal and States governments.

A network of misandric, biased, criminal ‘Shelters’ has covered the land with a new and vicious corruption at grass-roots level, purportedly to ‘assist’ women but in fact act as a conduit for corruption and criminality.

I only have to mention Professor Stephen Baskerville’s ‘Taken into Custody’ work for many at MND to understand. Or Professor Carey Roberts’ exposes.

But little gets written about other Anglophile countries. How much is known in MRM circles and outside in the MSM about the corruption in the UK, for instance.

I would like to set some facts down about another, Australia, a huge, continental nation with a very modest population where leftist governments have dominated the various States and now are in control Federally. This wonderful land has been infected with the virus of feminist corruption to the detriment of government, law, Institutions and families, men and women.

The rationale for all of the pertinent Law, the hysteria, the draconian legislations is Domestic Violence.

The most horrendous lies are told about DV. And people seem to believe them. They have been persuaded.

Deliberately Lying about Domestic Violencein Australia.

I am indebted to a Senior Australian Public Servant who must remain anonymous, for some crucial parts of this long and detailed blog entry.

Pick up almost any newspaper on any given day and you will most likely find a by-line claiming: “Statistics show …”; “new survey finds …”; or, “new study proves …”. Often accompanied by embellishments such as “shocking”, “appalling”, and so on.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than on the subject of gender relations and in particular the emotionally charged subject of domestic violence, or it’s substitute “family violence”.

It is about neither of course.

It is all about women.

Hysteria is carefully stage-managed.

Only lip service is paid to the idea that males might be victims, and then, we are told, they deserve it anyway.

Let me be clear from the start. I do not like domestic violence, just as I do not like muggings, murders, rapes, armed robberies, cats and dogs lying together etc. But rarely is there any need for muggings to be blown out of proportion by including in their statistics the asking for an ice-cream, even when a tantrum follows a ‘no’.

The panic and hysteria generated by falsified and invented Domestic Violence statistics does far more damage to society and to men and women’s relations, than the very small amount of Domestic violence that exists and which is blown completely out of proportion.

Australia does not collect unified data on Domestic Violence. Not directly. Figures get lifted out of context from a variety of ‘official’ documents.

Where do you think they come from?

The most widely cited statistics on the subject in Australia is the Women’s Safety Survey, published in 1996 , that repeats American claims, “One in four women experience domestic violence, within their lifetime”.

There was no Men’s Safety Survey.

The bias was there even before the survey was designed.

It was another ten years, 2006, before a further more inclusive Safety survey was conducted.

This article looks at this biased, anti-male 1996 Survey and other sources which have driven Public Policy in Australia.

I will also show the 2006 survey in some depth and reveal the government’s response.

One in Four Women Abused.

This American claim of ‘One in Four’ ubiquitously applied to most female claims of outrage, first surfaced in the left-wing Feminist Ms Magazine in the 1970’s after a deliberately doctored survey about rape using a self-selected sample of its anti-male readers.

One in Four is a ‘super-term’. It is akin to an hypnotic chant that robs people of control over their thoughts. It is applied to almost anything to do with women.

Being given a glass of wine before sex constituted rape according to that travesty of a survey, commissioned by Ms and conducted by a misandric feminazi ‘Professor’, Mary Koss.

A considerable broadening of what constitutes domestic violence and sexual assault was demanded by feminists in America to access the gravy train of the Violence Against Women Act, (VAWA) and the left-wing President Clinton, the well known sexual assaulter of young women employees, complied.

Clinton sought to make reparation to his feminist harridan of a wife for his own sexual incontinence by punishing every man in America.

He was assisted in this by the then Senator Joe Biden, now the Vice President, an aptly named position for such a twisted mind – who explained how he used to be beaten-up by his sister when he was young, and was making his own Kow-Tow to her continued ‘advice’. Which no doubt was ‘Do it MY way, or ELSE’.

Biden was an architect of VAWA. He cared not for violence against men and may well be a masochist by nature.

VAWA opened the door to a widespread and mendacious catalogue of innocuous behaviours being classified as ‘assault’ and DV in a flood of Advocacy Research.

People in other western countries will recognise the same dirty fingers in the pie-charts of their own bogus and mendacious advocacy research underpinning their own Government Policies.

The “Women’s Safety Survey” (WSS) findings, which uses this sleight of hand, underpins Australian Government policy and legislation in every Australian state jurisdiction – with the exception of Victoria, which now evidently claims that “one in five women are victims of domestic violence”.

This apparently suggests that women would be much safer if they all moved to Victoria. Maybe it is something in the Victorian air.

No “study” is of much value until it has been subjected to peer review. This hasn’t occurred in relation to the Women’s Safety Survey. For a number of reasons, there is an urgent need for independent and thorough research and review.

The WSS study was released under the imprimatur of the Australian Bureau of Statistics but was in fact a creature of the bureaucratically powerful Office of Status of Women which commissioned and directed the survey.

There was significant consternation reported at that time in relation to complaints, by ABS officers – that they were being “bullied” into undertaking unprofessional, and methodologically flawed “advocacy research” – research which is designed to prove the existence of something, whether it exists or not.

Several Executive level officers of the ABS were later ‘re-located’ to ‘re-education’ roles

The notion that one in four women are suffering from domestic violence is alarming and conjures images, at the very least, of black eyes and bruises occurring on an appalling scale.

But it is a lie.

How many Australian’s would know that the survey included such largely irrelevant questions as “Have you ever received an obscene phone call?” .

A phone rings and no one is there. Bogus fear is conveniently generated from a neurotic mind.

Tick the box.

Another sexual assault.

Yeh. Pig’s arse !

It beggars belief that questions like this formed the bulk of the survey.

It has barley any relevance to domestic violence at all.

But…. It’s another male-damning statistic.

But the Office for the Status of Women did not stop there. The determined harridans were intent on spin to beat all spin.

How many would know that the survey report blurred the fact that some 27 per cent of respondents were actually reporting violence caused by other women?

Heck, that’s just over One in Four !

It must have been men that made them do it.

Believe me, you can be convinced.

In fact, you have been.

There were many other seriously disturbing aspects to this survey. For example, it also involved only voluntary participation, which is a key source of survey bias – just as in the Ms magazine survey – as it attracts participants who may have a vested interest the subject matter, a factor that can dramatically skew the results.

In the desired direction, of course.

And, it was a “life incidence” survey, thus inviting the recitation of some event far off in both time and in memory.

The failings of human memory with the passage of time is well recognised by our legal system, which, with very few exceptions, refuses to admit evidence that has been muddied by time and with no corroboration.

Forty years and a bitter divorce can change a memory from someone merely “pushing away” into “he threw me down the stairs”.

Who is there to contradict?

No evidence was even sought.

The law recognises the frailty of old memories but our ever -increasing victim culture does not.

Society would not entertain the concept that someone is currently considered to be a “road accident victim” based on a minor bruise they had incurred in a vehicle accident 20 years ago.

Nor would we necessarily put much faith in a 20-year-old version of how the accident occurred.

Yet this is precisely what such surveys on domestic violence increasingly attempt to encourage for society to accept as reality, current and relevant for domestic violence and assault.

When citing the “one in four” statistic, some domestic violence literature conveniently leaves out the phrase “within their lifetime”, giving a false impression of immediacy; that one in four women are victims, right now, on this very day.

Think about that.

Every shout-at, telling-off, even smack on the legs when we were five years old being counted so that everyone has been the ‘victim’ of abuse.

Moreover, the Women’s Safety Survey did not overtly and clearly say that one in four women were victims of “physical” domestic violence, but included a range of other non-physical and both potentially and actually non-violent behaviours that were then re-classified as “domestic violence”.

It covertly implies it is all physical violence.

A man not handing over his pay-packet to his wife is ‘economic DV’.

No mention that it demanding his wages is extortion.

Him answering that ‘Yes’ her bum does look fat in those jeans, is ‘verbal DV’.

It ‘demeans” and is therefore ‘violent’.

An argument between a couple with both shouting is HIM being violent.

She is simply defending herself by ‘communicating’.

Advocacy research has taken over much of what passes for academic and ‘official’ date collection.

It sets out to provide ‘proof’ for a conclusion already held. It supports a Prejudice.

Why do you think that anyone would want to go to the time and effort to do that?

Show me the Money.

Domestic violence literature, when citing such advocacy research survey findings characterise the one in four statistic as referring to physical violence.

The leaflets handed out by the self-declared socially-conscious commercial retail chain, “The Body Shop”, being a case in point.

It manipulates. It attracts. It drew wannabee socially conscious women customers in to buy fragrant soaps and candles, to ‘support victims of domestic violence’.

Domestic Violence lies sells women’s products.

“After you have been beaten by an unappreciative man, you poor victimized woman, you need to pamper yourself. You deserve it.”

“Oooh, let me have some of those candles, you poor thing, I am a victim, too. Honest.”

“Is that right. Could you take a minute to fill out this survey while I wrap these for you”.

Such ‘women’s goods’ shop chains have no shame in ripping off women by appealing to ‘support for victims’.

Even refugees from Torture and Trauma are roped in. The Refugee resettlement organisations in Australia get Government funds which are then siphoned off to run ‘joint’ appeals with such women’s goodies retail outlets for ‘raising consciousness’. And getting women to fill in surveys.

They only mention women refugees of course. The maimed men do not get to take part. It makes for a fine week’s boost to turnover and the private company ‘bottom line’.

It gets women’s votes too.

Domestic violence literature across the board not only blurs the past with the present but blends quite different and sometimes relatively innocuous behaviours with the abjectly violent, in order to incite a widespread impression that physical domestic violence against women is currently running rampant and unchecked in our community.

The survey gives an Australian flavour to the increasingly Internationalised American charade of a law, the Violence Against Women Act, brought in by the American Cultural-Marxist group, the National Organisation of Women, and pushed through by the efforts of the current American Vice President, Joe Biden.

Such a gender biased law has gobbled up Billions of dollars of American taxpayers money funneled to women’s groups; with nothing at all to male ‘victims’.

Australia is behind with the Dollars but then it is a much smaller tax-base. It is just Hundreds of Millions. With the Global Economic Crisis upon us, it will catch up with some Stimulus Packages for the girls, be sure. Kevin Rudd’s ‘working families’ have had their day and the non-working, single-mother families are on the increase.

No prizes for guessing why.

Right now in 2009 our Great leader, Chairman Mousey Kev is announcing a massive increase in Grants to women. More to the Violence against Women mantra. Our Equality Chairwoman (!) was doing the Press round appearing on TV in July 2009 to rally the media at the weekly Press Club broadcast.

Here we are in the middle of the worst recession, supposedly, since the demise of the Mickey Mouse Club and the girls want what is left of the money.

The Office for the Status of Women is a vast black hole into which taxpayer’s money is poured. It exists soley to benefit Government and the powerful female bureaucrats that run the show, none of which has ever seen a glass ceiling.

The Office channels Policy like Shirley MacLain channels 5000 year old Egyptian Gurus.

A beneficiary has been the Health Departments both Federal and State that have had billions of dollars funneled into ‘Women’s Health’ while dregs are given to men.

But I digress.

The mendacious nature of the now ubiquitous term domestic violence, which brings under its one heading a range of non-physical behaviours is of primary concern. The nuances of context and intensity are increasingly lost in a determined re-interpretation of any kind of marital disagreement, into a paradigm of male “perpetrator” and a female “victim”.

It breaks traditional families apart.

We see a lot of street behaviour that we might regard as offensive or verbally aggressive but in the absence of a physical assault (whether major or minor) we don’t classify it as violence per se.

It drives a biased, anti-male Un-Australian Industry that expropriates Public Monies and supports commercial interests.

It drives prejudiced and bigoted Government Policy.

The survey does not like to stand out like a sore thumb as the only data. Let’s look at the other common sources of dodgy data misrepresented by our feminist-driven Government, to convince the Australian public that we have an epidemic of Family Violence which is attributed solely to evil Australian men.

Lies build upon lies.

More lies convince better than just one.

Let us take a look at intervention orders issued by the lower courts as a source of bogus “statistical evidence” of the “magnitude” of domestic or ‘family’ violence.

Let us also will look at Police records of DV ‘Incidents’ and how they are not at all what they seem. Or what the general public is told.

Let us look at the Supported Accommodation Assistance Program which is also misrepresented to the detriment of men and the advantage of the DV Industry.

Wrong and often bogus statistics are deployed, with an apparent intention to deliberately mislead.

Add Wing of Bat and Eye of Lizard to the Pot

Having looked at the uncorroborated, biased and manipulated Women’s Safety Survey let us look now at Intervention Orders and how they are manipulated too.

Most “finalised” intervention orders are finalised simply because they are uncontested. That is, the male “respondent” is persuaded (often bullied) by court officials, such as Deputy Court Registrars, into signing up for a “final” or “permanent” order rather than contest the allegations in court.

The lower courts don’t want any more congestion if it can be avoided.

Men are manipulated. The Bat’s-wing.

Convincing a bewildered “respondent” to sign up for the permanent order on the basis of a “By Consent, Without Admissions“, is not particularly difficult, especially if a solicitor has already advised him that it could cost up to $10,000 if he goes to court.

And further, that he will most likely lose.

The Burden of Proof is laid on the defendant, not the accuser. Proving a negative is plain impossible.

The legal test is not “beyond reasonable doubt” but merely the “balance of probabilities”. This is a very weak civil law test in the context of penalties that could ultimately imprison a respondent, and certainly dispossess him of his assets.

This happens in Tasmania where the ironically misnamed ‘Safe at Home Act’ ensures that male arrest is automatic with no bail on simple female accusation.

He loses access to his home and children and even loses his job because he cannot prove he didn’t do what he didn’t do. Magistrates are badgered by the Safe at Home Act and are increasingly fearful of bad publicity if a violent act should possibly subsequently occur.

As it is quite possible. The catalyst for possible subsequent violence, ironically, is often the faked restraining order allegations in the first place and the trauma of being hauled into court often for the first time in his life. The magistrates are as aware as anyone of the adage, “Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb’.

In this instance is ‘hang him just in case he has his eye on a lamb’.

When you are convicted of something you didn’t do, on a false allegation you cannot disprove, you may well want to earn your punishment.

So much for “justice” and the fading jurisprudential notion of the “presumption of innocence”.

Whether a female complainant was ever genuinely fearful or merely a perjurer and liar is more often than not un-explored. And if it is questioned at all, with due compassion and concern for the ‘victim’, the diluted “balance of probabilities” test still renders such findings questionable.

Domestic violence literature increasingly proclaims that domestic violence is a crime. Quite so. Therefore, in any legal action, the criminal law test of “beyond reasonable doubt” should be applied.

It never is.

Given the growing understanding that intervention orders are regularly used as a tactical weapon in achieving favourable custody and property outcomes in subsequent Family Court proceedings, a count of intervention orders as a measure of “violence against women” is virtually meaningless.

Yet such statistics are used for precisely that.

I sat in the Hobart, Tasmania, Family Court and listened as a ‘fearful’ 27 y/o ex-wife of four years marriage accused her poor sod of a ex-husband of 62 from whom she had taken three quarters of his lifetime’s assets, of murdering her previous boyfriend – who in fact had been deported as an illegal immigrant – and of being an International Terrorist. He had been in the Israeli army on National Service 30 years before.

The Judge said she was being ‘fanciful’. No charges of perjury were laid and no investigations ordered for such heinous crimes, And she was awarded the children. Of course. ‘Just in case’.

Over the course of the following three years that man was arrested seven times and spent four nights in jail. He was hospitalized twice. He was arrested on one occasion after she accused him of assault. He had leaned on her car.

Another domestic violence statistic.

Always added, never subtracted when disproven. No one tries to seek truth. It was disregarded at his Court case that he has been run over by a horse and buggy and has a damaged back. He leaned because he was in pain.

Tough.

Which brings us onto the Eye of Lizard.

Another statistic commonly cited by an increasingly frenzied domestic violence Industry is the number of POLICE CALL-OUTS to domestic or family violence ‘Incidents’.

Whether the “incident” involved verbal disagreement between husband and wife or an act of actual violence, we would never know. It is merely noted as an “incident”.

In fact, if the protagonists were two 14 year old brothers arguing on the front lawn that too, would be noted on the official records as a domestic or family violence incident.

These records of “incidents” are then inevitably fed into the ever-swelling “conduit” of statistics that ultimately produces headlines that purport, “alarming new data shows domestic violence against women running out of control”.

The police in any region know who the violent families are. They attend the same people time and time again. The vast majority of citizens are not violent and do not have ‘domestic violence’ in their homes and families.

But when one family chalks up 25 ‘Incidents’ in three months, and 200 families account for 2000 Incidents, it is made to appear that ten times as many men are guilty than are.

The women never are guilty of course. They are made out to be 2000 victims.

The end result is then ever-increasing public funding to combat the ever burgeoning horror of violence against women. Nobody ever delves deep enough to examine how many of these police reported “incidents” actually involved a physical violence or threat of violence or indeed whether a woman was even present at the time.

Leg of Cane-Toad too.

Few if any newspapers or TV ‘expose’ shows ever investigate the amount of public funding to any organisation that puts itself under the “domestic violence umbrella” or else you will instantly understand why this has become a publicly funded “industry” of vast size.

The Supported Accommodation Assistance Program (SAAP) is yet another supportive source of statistics on so-called “family violence”.

The SAAP gives priority to ‘battered women’.

Love that phrase.

What the SAAP data does not show however, is how many women were encouraged to falsely claim that they were fleeing family violence, or indeed what the nature of the “violence” was, so that they could receive the priority treatment gravy train.

A recent Canberra Times article, lamenting the lack of affordable low cost public housing for poor families, featured a couple with young children who were forced to live in a caravan. A “housing worker” was quoted as suggesting to the mother, “If there was family violence, you could get a house straight away”: i.e. claim you are a female victim and the “world is your oyster”.

Male victims need not apply.

He would not be allowed in her ‘priority’ house.

Using SAAP data as a measure of violence against women is badly flawed because it can be and is misconstrued – again with an apparent deliberate intent – to reflect a statistic illustrating the number of women and children fleeing family violence.

In fact, at this point you might care to watch a short video on just where so much ‘family violence’ actually originates –

Kuwaiti authorities have apprehended the person suspected of setting fire to a wedding tent and killing 41 people and said Monday the motive was personal. Local newspapers reported the groom’s ex-wife was the arsonist.

Whoops, sorry. Not an Australian statistic there. Unless she seeks refugee status and pops into the Body Shop for some scented candles. Back to Aussie homeless.

SAAP data, in fact, often reflects the large number of homeless men who being so frequently dispossessed by individual chicanery, destructive, psychotic women and Family Court excoriation, are seeking emergency accommodation. They do not get priority of course.

By both omission and commission, Australia is being sold a very gross and socially dangerous statistical lie – one that is serving only the interests of its creators, and those legions who have so readily signed up to the fictional notion that every fourth female face we see each day is secretly living in stark terror and fear of “family violence”.

So, What is the Truth.

Some women unfortunately are victims of ‘family violence’, let’s admit as evidence and acknowledge the fact.

1.2% are according to a rare example of independentUniversity research by Bruce Headly and Dorothy Scott of Melbourne University and David De Vaus of La Trobe.

But that was a non-self-selected, random sample.

1.2%. This tiny percentage, well below the oft cited 25%, needed first aid, so bad was the violence they had experienced at the hands of a domestic partner.

And so did some men.

The same research shows 1.8% for men needing first aid.

A full 50% higher.

Even smaller percentages of both needed a doctor’s attention. But again more men than women. 1.5% men vs 1.1% women.

Moreover, the Headly, Scott and De Vaus summary measure of experiencing a range of forms of assault fails to reveal any preponderance of assaults on women:

4.7% of the sample reported being assaulted ‘in some way’ during the last 12 months; 5.7% of men and 3.7% of women. Not needing any attention to damage though.

They had had a shouting match and called each other naughty names.

Again, that is over half as many men more than women. And so far below the mythical 25%, the 1:4, terribly, awfully suffering women, as to make a total rejection of feminist lies.

What must be untangled – so that effective measures can be put into place – is the real incidence of such violence from the bogus statistical misrepresentations that are serving an entirely different agenda.

The critical issue about DV is all too often overlooked completely; it’s low experience in the community.

· 94.4% of people reported in Headly et al, being neither perpetrators nor victims of violence.

· 2.5% report both assaulting and being assaulted.

· 2.1% report being assaulted but not committing assault.

· 1.0% report assaulting their partner but not being assaulted.

No signs at all of 1:4 or 25% anywhere.

This Independent research showed clearly that DV affects a miniscule proportion of the population, and on every measure but one men suffered greater domestic violence from women than women did from men and in greater percentage numbers.

The one measure?

She calls the police far more often.

The mantle of mass victimhood casts a long and very dark shadow that too often conceals the very location of the destruction of truth and where propaganda is given the oxygen for its blowtorch.

The Federal Government spent $73 million on television adverts showing only male perpetrators and only female victims.

Sheer AgitProp.

THAT is domestic violence.

You paid for it with expropriated taxes.

The advertising camapign was labeled “propaganda against men” with many men criticising its negative and blatantly false “stereotypical portrayals”.

One notable Australian commentator described it as ‘the worst piece of deliberate Government black propaganda against a biologically distinguishable group ever seen outside of Nazi Germany”.

Almost all political tyrannies have their origin in segregating societies into the conceptual equivalent of “good and evil”, “angels and demons”, “victims and perpetrators”. “Four legs good, two legs bad”. There is never a middle ground

“Male equals perpetrator”, “female equals victim”.

When liars are afoot in society, in power, their first weapon of choice is statistical “proof” to provide convincing lies.

One has to wonder why intelligent, moral men and women in Australia put up with this. Men are demonized but say little to protect their Reputations and their legitimate interests.

Women’s legitimate interests have been hi-jacked by a clique of destructive, Marxist-Feminist women who spread blatant lies on their behalf, expropriate public monies and claim a bogus high moral ground.

It would be generous to think that this manipulation and bias was just the result of incompetence. But as we can see there is something far darker behind it. It is corruption. It is deliberate.

It is statistical corruption; fiscal corruption; political corruption.

As a result of that bogus 1996 survey, and with the ongoing manipulation and misrepresentation of the three other ‘Official’ statistics discussed above, women fear walking in the street, especially at night. Every husband is regarded as a potential wife-beater. Funds flow to women’s groups.

Domestic Violence advocacy was the fastest growing Industry of the decade following, employing thousands in ‘jobs for the girls, paid from taxpayer expropriations

The Truth is out there – somewhere.

I mentioned before that an Official but Independent and reliable survey needs to be done to establish valid figures for Policy determination.

Following the row between the Women’s Office and the Australian Bureau of Statistics, over Feminist manipulation and bullying, the ABS conducted it’s own survey.

It took ten years to get around to it, mind you.

The results were very different to the bogus ones of the Office for the Status of Women, despite their continued attempts to interfere and manipulate.

The Australian Government has ignored the more relevant ABS findings under pressure from those same feminists who continue to exercise undemocratic control.

The ABS to manage to do a more reliable examination in 2006 which tried to show the truth. At least it didn’t leave out an entire gender this time.

Once again, however, the Feminists managed to interfere and manipulate, and I will show you how. I also show how you can delve into the data collected to bring the Truth into the light of day.

And along with its appearance, the statistical myths and fabrications of feminist’s victimhood, and women’s class oppression , and claims of an epidemic of violence against women – were able to be immediately exposed and contradicted

But the silence was deafening.

Have you heard of the Personal Safety Survey or its findings?

No?

What a surprise. !

Have you heard of 1 in 4 women are victims of domestic violence?

Of course you have.

The silence didn’t last of course as it was soon replaced with a $73 million Government advertising campaign based on the oldfalse results appearing on TV sets nation-wide.

It was like sticking fingers in women’s ears and having them chant “lalalalalala;Men, bad; Women, victims”.

The survey reveals a picture of what any rational person should have assumed about life simply by observation of the world around them and their day to day existence in it.

The survey reveals what most people should have known or should have suspected about the facts of social violence –

it is men rather than women who have the most to fear regarding their personal safety.

It further reveals that the perpetrators of violence, in all their ugly forms and diversity, are not just men, and that the domain of perpetrators includes a significant percentage of women.

There are few surprises in this survey other than it seems to have been conducted with appropriate propriety and adherence to statistical principles.

Almost.

A refreshing breath of almost-fresh air given the lies and spin of so many preceding studies and surveys conducted on this subject.

But before delving into some its facts and figures, there are a couple of points that should be clarified about the survey itself.

As surveys go, it seems to have been done fairly responsibly but with some clear prior interference. It encompassed a sizeable sample of the population – 16,300 adults in total, about 0.1% of the Australian adult population – so its findings could be seen to be a reasonable reflection of what’s really going on in Australia today.

That’s 2 and a ½ times the sample size of the feminist’s survey.

However, for some reason you will instantly recognise, nearly three times as many women were surveyed than men – 11,800 women compared to only 4,500 men.

What a surprise !

The feminists just cannot help themselves, can they?

Ask yourselves; there are 50% women and 50% men in our society. There are usually one man and one woman in a domestic couple.

OK. There are sometimes two men together, and two women together, but rare.

So why a sample that is 75% women and 25% men?

It is better than 100% women and 0% men, as in the 1996 survey, but still only a little better. Half a loaf.

Men’s experiences of personal safety are not deemed as valid as those of women. Did they expect that women’s experiences of violence would be more valid, diverse or significant?

Or was it simply a matter of funding as is implied in the survey’s notes?

Funding controlled by feminists in the bureaucracy?

You get the Report; read it carefully and make your own mind up. Read the notes.

Whatever the reason for it, and there is no fair or justifiable stance that could possibly be taken for this glaring discrepancy, the question remains, why were men relegated to being less than second class respondents?

No one has provided an answer.

You can go figure it for yourself, but perhaps we can hope this imbalance will be addressed in any further surveys where the sex of the respondents is relevant.

For now though, when digesting the results, it must be understood that sample distribution bias still exists .

In fact, in some cases, reflected in the ABS tables, annotations have been made by the statisticians indicating that the data may be of questionable reliability.

Why would that be?

Why would the ABS warn about its own data?

I will tell you in a moment.

Given the importance and far reaching social implications of this survey, this restriction of men’s experiences is a travesty of their rights as taxpayers and citizens of the nation.

Especially as it turns out from the survey results that men are the most severely affected members of society where personal safety and violence are concerned.

This treatment of men is a clear statement by the Government that they see Australian men as being second class and less important than the women of the nation.

Yet, in the Liberal’s defense, – they had achieved Government by then – it must be argued that they are the first and so far only government in Australia to include men in such a survey at all.

Previous Labor governments, which had presided over the totally bogus Women’s Safety Survey, simply didn’t care about the safety of men and only ever conducted safety surveys for women.

This development in itself is at least some consolation for Australian men and was a positive step forward.

Now, the reason for the annotated questioning of the reliability of the data, especially about the men.

You see, the other glaring concern about the production of this ABS survey was the sexist exclusion of men as interviewers.

100% of the interviews were conducted by women.

Only women were employed as interviewers.

No men.

By order of the Feminist bureaucracy.

It is important to realise that by using ONLY female interviewers, it is likely to have led to an underreporting of spousal and partner violence against men by females and an over-reporting of men’s violence against women.

In a national survey of this significance, one could have at least expected squeaky-clean adherence to equal-sex political correctness.

Hah!

Pig’s Arse !

Despite these sexist anomalies the survey reveals for the first time, much important information about personal safety, and the victims and perpetrators of personal violence.

It is a subject, which has long been obscured by the murky fog of feminist advocacy. Prejudice and proving prior expectations have ruled such research.

But against the odds, this survey has revealed and has exposed the feminist lies.

The following statements, derived directly from the ABS survey, are just the initial findings and a fuller investigation by YOU, yourself, of the finer detail is encouraged.

Do not simply take my word.

I will compare the freshly published data to the often-quoted rhetorical statistics of feminist propaganda – and remember this, these are official Australian government research figures and not some trumped up, biased, ideologically prejudiced University Women’s Studies data or those of some politically or gender- biased NGO.

Those rhetorical stats use the 1:4 comparison device, or the ‘per second’ and per day and per week device to hide the real numbers which would look as small as they actually are.

It sounds so much better to say that two women a week are killed by husbands – as the Deputy Prime Minister of the UK is fond of spouting – than to say that 102 women out of a population of 30 million are killed annually by nutters.

Two per week generates more hysteria than 0.00034%

And of course the feminists never tell you that 94 UK men per annum, nearly but not quite two men per week are killed by female spouses.

Facts – the ABS survey has revealed that –

In Australia, men are more than twice as likely as women to be the victims of violence and are being physically or sexually assaulted or threatened, at the rate of up to 2 incidents per second

Women are not the victims of family (domestic) violence anywhere near as often as the quoted 25%, 1 in 4, – nor even 1 in 10, – nor even 1 in 20, but actually 1 in 50

That is to say, 2%

2%

Women are not being raped and sexually assaulted every 26 seconds, as claimed by the Feminists of the Office for the Status of Women, nor even every 90 seconds, as other feminists frequently claim, but are in fact experiencing rape hardly at all.

And even when combined with the lesser sexual assaults, it is at a rate 91%less than that which feminists have previously claimed.

Look at that another way. Feminist claims are exaggerated by at least 10 times.

And this includes both reported and all unreported incidents ‘discovered’ by the survey interviewers.

The ratio of female vs male family (domestic) violence victims in a home is not99:1, with men very rarely assaulted and women bashed daily, nor 95:5, nor 75:1, nor even 50:1, but is actually …… 2:1

And some of the women are being assaulted in the ‘domestic’ sphere by other women.

These statements above are all calculated from the ABS survey data without corruption. Look at the figures.

Of course there will be some deviation from the survey compared to real life figures, just as in all studies – always read the fine print of surveys – but, remember, nearly three women were interviewed for every one man.

The data for men may have been tainted by the use of only female interviewers, some of whom may even have been staunch feminists, – show me a woman who claims she isn’t and I will show you a lonely one – and together with the sample number bias, resulting in underreporting of men’s experience of family violence as victims.

Let us look closely at some other interesting statistics –

During the previous 12 months in Australia, that is, in 2005,

6.5% of males were physically assaulted.

And 3.1% of females

That is 1 in 15 men compared to 1 in 32 women.

Conclusion: Women are safer.

Attempted or threatened physical assaults were against 5.3% of males and just 2.1% of females.

Conclusion: Women are 2.5 times safer from threats and attempts than men are.

Women can expect greater safety than men can.

There isn’’t a bogeyman down every dark street looking for a woman to assault.

The bogeyman is too busy assaulting men.

In the sexual assault area beloved of feminists and the source of fright, alarm and horror – and endless expropriated taxes for agitprop – the survey indeed finds the figures swing to women being more likely to be sexually assaulted than men are.

But the figures are lower still.

Not 1 in 4 women.

Not 25%, as reported in the bogus Women’s Safety Survey.

It is just 1.6%

1 – point – 6 – per cent reported being sexually assaulted.

Did you hear that? 1.6 %

That’s 1 in 62. Not 1 in 4.

And MEN are sexually assaulted too. 0.6 %.

Threats and attempts at sexual assault are even lower.

0.5% for women and 0.1% for men.

98% of women are perfectly safe and not even under threat of sexual assault.

Sexual assault on women, and even on men, is very low.

Not that such a F.A.C.T. fact makes headlines in the newspapers.

It doesn’t sell.

It doesn’t sell ‘stuff’ like scented candles and soap in the Body Shop.

Why are women being deliberately frightened by the Government?

YOU have to ask your MP.

Deliberately Frightening Women: Neglecting Men.

In conclusion, what does all this mean?

It means that Australia as a nation is the first in the Western world to undertake a survey of adult personal safety and violence based on the sex of the community.

It has both massive and broad implications for social scrutiny and the politics of sex and violence. It stands as a precedent for further world development and application.

It also has immediate application to other Western societies. Australia, being a contemporary Western nation has been subjected, more or less, to the same political influences over the last half century that have been experienced by the USA, UK, Canada, New Zealand and arguably most other European nations.

The data recorded would be directly applicable to other Western societies, more or less and may be quoted as a being from a highly reputable source.

The results of this survey should be seen as the first authoritative sample of non-advocacy research on the issues of Western social violence and in particular, inter-gender personal violence.

The results are both revealing and deeply informative.

Revealing about the incorrectness of previously published feminist advocacy research – and subsequent government information too – and informative about the dire state of violence perpetrated against men in modern civilised Western societies.

The data also provide the basis for a requirement for Western governments to become focused on the safety standards of its men as a top priority and to begin to recognise that there are serious deficiencies in its treatment of men in society.

The survey also amplifies the ludicrous state of Western government’s pursuit of highly expensive anti-violence campaigns and legislation for the least affected victims of personal violence – women – whilst a much more serious problem of violence exists and is being waged against its men.

It also establishes facts that require governments and anti-male NGOs in Australia to immediately rewrite their literature and websites which state false and misleading statistics about personal violence, and in particular, men as overwhelmingly family violence perpetrators. They are not.

The data shows clearly that in the home, in the family, 98.5% of men are safe, law abiding, indeed loving, protective and caring husbands and fathers.

It should also lead to an immediate nation-wide reassessment of family relationship management and Family Law values.

But don’t hold your breath.

It’s no wonder that feminists, the government and the mainstream media in Australia have been so quiet about the release of this new survey.

It exposes a huge raft of feminist baloney, lies and deceptions.

The silence also shows that the Government is deliberately frightening women.

The Government wants women to be frightened of men.

And the media is in the Government’s pocket.

Yes, the truth is out – and out there – somewhere.

But have YOU seen it? Have YOU heard it?

You have now.

This is amfortas.

Ask, Who does the Grail Serve.

This is a written adaptation of three podcasts that I made recently with my colleague, Christian J. Perhaps you might listen to them and send them to others.

The ‘women’s Safety Survey’ was “uncorroborated, biased and manipulated” ‘Advocacy research’ orchestrated by the Office for the Status of Women and passed off as Bureau of Statistics report. It caused an enormous row, says MRA Amfortas. Manipulated definitions and hysterical claims copied from America made innocuous behaviour criminal. DV sells commercial products to women and expropriates public funds for the fastest growing ‘Industry in Australia.

Three other sources of ‘official’ data which are routinely manipulated and presented to support DV lies are analysed by Amfortas and compared to Independent University research which completely contradicts the ‘official message’.” It would be generous to think that this manipulation and bias was just the result of incompetence. But as we can see there is something far darker behind it. It is corruption. It is deliberate.”

Deliberately Lying about DV in Australia. Pt.3. The Truth is out there – Somewhere.

Christian J narrates how the 2006 Australian Bureau of Statistics Personal Safety Survey completely contradicted the Government’s 1996 survey. He also points to the attempts by feminist bureaucrats to manipulate by having ONLY female interviewers to bias the results. Results show women twice as safe as men. The Government has thrown a blanket of silence over it. Feminists maintain an undemocratic stranglehold, expropriating public monies for their anti-male ‘Industry’.

“When Momma ain’t Happy, Nobody’s Happy”. Amfortas and Paul Elam show how domestic violence and a lot worse are often caused by ‘controlling’ women who are willing to destroy their families to have their own way. Dr Eric Berne’s ‘Games’ are described including the major cause of broken families, the “Let’s you and Him Fight” strategy which uses the Police and Family Courts.

Most family lawyers in Ontario likely received at least one telephone call from a distraught client this winter following the series of national newspaper articles on parental alienation. Many of my clients called with a self-diagnosis: they were clearly “being alienated.” A handful of helpful clients clipped one of the articles out of the paper and mailed it to me personally. Sadly (but somehow not surprisingly) many of my clients had the pleasure of receiving a copy from a former spouse.

The dialogue surrounding alienation has caught the attention of not only the family law community, but also the public at large. Amidst the flurry of attention that it has garnered, we need to reflect on the reality that alienation does not occur in a vacuum. It exists as one of the many problems that lawyers, judges and other helping professionals face when confronted with a high-conflict family.

Although many issues surrounding alienation are hotly contested, it almost always occurs in the context of high-conflict families following a separation. High-conflict families exist and interact in a state of perpetual dysfunction and disorganization, which leads to further emotional and psychological strain.

Alienation or not, high-conflict families are not able to manage their interactions and communication at any level. They require, sometimes on a daily basis, the assistance and intervention of lawyers, judges, doctors, social workers and other helping professionals. They fight about travel, schooling, tutoring, soccer and music.

Tragically, in spite of the significant efforts made to identify and address the causes of conflict in post-separation families, we are confronted with not a decrease but an increase in high-conflict cases, including more alienating parents and alienated children. One of the major problems we face in dealing with high-conflict families arises from the major shift over the last ten years in our attitudes about identifiers and basic concepts of custody and access.

Structured definitions have become passé in the past decade, joint custody or label-free settlements have been considered by many to be the norm and requests for sole custody have become almost politically incorrect. This shift in attitudes is a result of a variety of social and political developments that have fundamentally altered the language of and attitudes about post-separation parenting roles across Canada.

In 1998, the Joint Senate House of Commons Committee on Custody and Access released its report, “For the Sake of the Children.” The report was the result of a political compromise reached when the federal child support guidelines were in the Senate and Senator Ann Cools imposed her fathers’ rights agenda on the process. The report suggested an increased emphasis on the maximum contact principle, a movement away from the language of “custody and access” and a presumption of joint custody in every case.

Although not adopted as law, the report and the fathers’ rights agenda have been highly influential on the public, legal and judicial mindset. There has been an increased preoccupation in custody and access litigation with elevating the maximum contact principle through the language of shared parenting.

Clients often feel pressured by mediators, mental health professionals, judges or their own counsel to agree to joint custody. “Just give it to him and the conflict will end;” “Why would you object?” and “Nothing will change anyhow; you will still make all the decisions in a practical sense” are the common arguments. I have said these things myself. When respected authorities put this kind of pressure on individuals who are already quaking under the emotional and financial costs of conflict, the result is pretty much assured: joint custody or label-free “deals.”

Sometimes spouses agree to these arrangements because they hope that conflict will abate if the other spouse’s role is ratified. Sometimes they believe that there will be few changes to the reality of the parenting roles and that a little joint custody label will not change that. In high-conflict cases, another compromise has been joint custody with the appointment of an arbitrator or parenting coordinator to assist with decisions that cannot be made jointly. Unfortunately, these rationales and compromises are almost always flawed.

Australia adopted radical new custody and access legislation in 2006 that established mandatory mediation of all custody cases and imposed a presumption of joint custody. The result has been increased conflict and custody litigation. This lesson translates to the issue of labels. Joint custody mixed with arbitration/parenting coordination can often create a forum for increased or continuing conflict by allowing access to a person who can be called, day or night, to referee issues that might actually not arise, or might get resolved naturally, if that opportunity for accessible conflict was not there.

Label-free arrangements can also lead to ongoing conflict and difficulty with third parties. Teachers, doctors and immigration officials require more than the language of “shared residency” or “parenting time.” In practice, many require opinion letters about what the terms mean, or refuse to take direction from one parent because they are unsure. In abduction and jurisdictional issues, the absence of custody can be devastating to an enforcement or Hague Convention proceeding. Police enforcement can also be very challenging without labels that everyone understands.

Sometimes the label the parties have put on their arrangements also matters to judges. In mobility cases, we are instructed by the Supreme Court to give the views of the custodial parent “great weight.” What is a court to make of a label-free parent, or the one who acts as a primary or sole parent but carries the label of joint? Or, when joint decision-making fails or parties become exhausted by parenting coordination, a material change is required and the judge wonders why he or she should change the former agreement, which the parties must have thought was in the best interests of their children at the time they settled.

While it is true that we all had good reasons and lofty ideas when we moved away from structured concepts, we need to re-examine these ideas in the context of high conflict cases. Parents and children who are embroiled in conflict need the certainty and stability that traditional concepts provide. Labels matter.

Martha McCarthy is a certified specialist in family law and the recipient of the Ontario Bar Association 2007 Award of Excellence in Family Law. She operates a boutique family law firm located in downtown Toronto.

These days, it is hard to come by an individual who does not know someone who has been divorced, or who has not been divorced themselves. In Hollywood, divorce is seemingly becoming a common occurrence, while paving the way for a society where we’re not only getting married later in life, but also searching for an almost unrealistic level of happiness in our marriage.

Many couples considering divorce refuse to believe that divorce can have a negative effect on their children. But many studies have been conducted that prove otherwise.

A long term study released in 2002 by the Institute for American Values found that “unhappily married adults who divorced were no more likely to report emotional or psychological improvements than those who stayed married.

According to this study, divorce does in fact NOT improve your emotional health. I think it would be safe to assume that this is due to the stress and financial burden divorce inflicts upon couples.

Here’s another fact you might not know…

The Institute for American Values study found that almost eight out of 10 couples who avoided divorce were happily married five years later. Surprising, isn’t it?

Here’s another fact…

Half of all American children will witness the breakup of a parent’s marriage. Of these, close to half will also see the breakup of a parent’s second marriage.” (Furstenberg, Peterson, Nord, and Zill, “Life Course”)

Many couples divorce, and then remarry without knowing the true cause of their marriage problems in the first marriage. This is why the second marriage divorce rate is even higher than that of the first marriage!

Here’s are some statistics specifically about the effects of divorce on children…

– Studies in the early 1980’s showed that children in repeat divorces earned lower grades and their peers rated them as less pleasant to be around. (Andrew J. Cherlin, Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage –Harvard University Press 1981)

– Forty percent of children growing up in America today are being raised without their fathers. (Wade, Horn and Busy, “Fathers, Marriage and Welfare Reform” Hudson Institute Executive Briefing, 1997)

– Teenagers in single-parent families and in blended families are three times more likely to need psychological help within a given year. (Peter Hill “Recent Advances in Selected Aspects of Adolescent Development” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 1993)

– Compared to children from homes disrupted by death, children from divorced homes have more psychological problems. (Robert E. Emery, Marriage, Divorce and Children’s Adjustment” Sage Publications, 1988)

That statistic is truly amazing, isn’t it? But let me continue on…here are are some more shocking statistics on the effect of divorce on children…

– Children living with both biological parents are 20 to 35 percent more physically healthy than children from broken homes. (Dawson, “Family Structure and Children’s Health and Well-being” Journal of Marriage and the Family)

– Most victims of child molestation come from single-parent households or are the children of drug ring members. (Los Angles Times 16 September 1985 The Garbage Generation)

– A Child in a female-headed home is 10 times more likely to be beaten or murdered. (The Legal Beagle, July 1984, from “The Garbage Generation”)

– The study of children six years after a parental marriage breakup revealed that even after all that time, these children tended to be “lonely, unhappy, anxious and insecure”. (Wallerstein “The Long-Term Effects of Divorce on Children” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 1991)

– Children of divorce are four times more likely to report problems with peers and friends than children whose parents have kept their marriages intact. (Tysse, Burnett, “Moral Dilemmas of Early Adolescents of Divorced and Intact Families. Journal of Early Adolescence 1993)

– Children of divorce, particularly boys, tend to be more aggressive toward others than those children whose parents did not divorce. (Emery, “Marriage, Divorce and Children’s Adjustment, 1988)

– Children of divorce are at a greater risk to experience injury, asthma, headaches and speech defects than children whose parents have remained married. (Dawson, “Family Structure and Children’s Health and Well Being” National Health Interview Survey on Child Health, Journal of Marriage and the Family)

– People who come from broken homes are almost twice as likely to attempt suicide than those who do not come from broken homes. (Velez-Cohen, “Suicidal Behavior and Ideation in a Community Sample of Children” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 1988)

– Children of divorced parents are roughly two times more likely to drop out of high school than their peers who benefit from living with parents who did not divorce. (McLanahan, Sandefur, “Growing Up With a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps” Harvard University Press 1994)

– Following divorce, children are fifty percent more likely to develop health problems than two parent families. (Angel, Worobey, “Single Motherhood and Children’s Health”)

– Of all children born to married parents this year, fifty percent will experience the divorce of their parents before they reach their 18th birthday. (Fagan, Fitzgerald, Rector, “The Effects of Divorce On America)

I hope these statistics may eventually cause you (or your spouse) to seriously consider all the consequences of divorce before you make that final decision.

Based on these statistics, it becomes obvious that children need stable, loving homes with both mom and dad. There is, of course an exception to every rule, and in this case it is households where abuse is taking place. Children should under no circumstances remain in an abusive atmosphere that is unsafe for them.

But if there is no abuse taking place in your marriage and the two of you have simply “grown apart”,or fell out of love, I urge you to seek out help for your marriage before you give up completely. For your children’s sake, even if you’re feeling hopeless right now, get help for your marriage today.

With an 88% success rate, Larry Bilotta’s Marriage Lifeline Program, gives you hope for your marriage – even if you’re the only one who wants to Save your marriage. For FREE, straightforward, no-nonsense advice you can use to save your marriage, with or WITHOUT your spouse’s participation visit Larry’s web site: Stop Your Divorce.

There is a segment of society for whom traditional family values are increasingly irrelevant, and for whom spring-break sexual liberationism is increasingly costly: men and women in their 20s.

This opens a hormone-filled gap — a decade and more of likely sexual activity before marriage. And for those in that gap, there is little helpful guidance from the broader culture. Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, argues that the “courtship narrative” in the past was clear: dating, engagement, marriage, children. This narrative has been disrupted without being replaced, leaving many 20-somethings in a “relational wasteland.”

The casual sex promoted in advertising and entertainment often leads, in the real world of fragile hearts and STDs, to emotional and physical wreckage. But it doesn’t seem realistic to expect most men and women to delay sex until marriage at 26 or 28. Such virtue is both admirable and possible — but it can hardly be a general social expectation. So religious institutions, for example, often avoid this thorny topic, content to live with silence, hypocrisy and active singles groups.

In the absence of a courtship narrative, young people have evolved a casual, ad hoc version of their own: cohabitation. From 1960 to 2007, the number of Americans cohabiting increased fourteenfold. For some, it is a test-drive for marriage. For others, it is an easier, low-commitment alternative to marriage. About 40 percent of children will now spend some of their childhood in a cohabiting union.

How is this working out? Not very well. Relationships defined by lower levels of commitment are, not unexpectedly, more likely to break up. Three-quarters of children born to cohabiting parents will see their parents split up by the time they turn 16, compared with about one-third of children born to married parents. So apart from the counsel of cold showers or “let the good times roll,” is there any good advice for those traversing the relational wilderness? Religion and morality contribute ideals of character. But social science also indicates some rough, practical wisdom.

First, while it may not be realistic to maintain the connection between marriage and sex, it remains essential to maintain the connection between marriage and childbearing. Marriage is the most effective institution to bind two parents for a long period in the common enterprise of raising a child — particularly encouraging fathers to invest time and attention in the lives of their children. And the fatherless are some of the most disadvantaged, betrayed people in our society, prone to delinquency, poverty and academic failure. Cohabitation is no place for children.

Second, the age of first marriage is important to marital survival and happiness. Teen marriage is generally a bad idea, with much higher rates of divorce. Romeo and Juliet were, in fact, young fools. Later marriage has been one of the reasons for declining national divorce rates. But this does not mean the later the better. Divorce rates trend downward until leveling off in the early 20s. But people who marry after 27 tend to have less happy marriages — perhaps because partners are set in their ways or have unrealistically high standards. The marital sweet spot seems to be in the early to mid-20s.

Third, having a series of low-commitment relationships does not bode well for later marital commitment. Some of this expresses preexisting traits — people who already have a “nontraditional” view of commitment are less likely to be committed in marriage. But there is also evidence, according to Wilcox, that multiple failed relationships can “poison one’s view of the opposite sex.” Serial cohabitation trains people for divorce. In contrast, cohabitation by engaged couples seems to have no adverse effect on eventual marriage.

Reforming Family Law: What You Can Do Right Now

I began my weekly broadcast this past Tuesday through Talkshoe.com on the Get Your Justice Live network with Lary Holland. For the rest of this week my office has been overwhelmed with the question: so what do we do now?

I’ve been receiving calls and emails from every corner of the the country from people in tragic situations of their own, shaped by the misuse of the family law system and lack of access to true justice. This isn’t a problem easily attacked on a case-by-case basis. If it was, we would have had reform a long time ago. It’s a problem that demands people bring their cases and make themselves heard in a set of unified voices.

In the past, the system has worked against families systematically and – at least in terms of acting in a destructive manner – efficiently. Meanwhile, we have been fighting it one-by-one and ineffectively. It’s time for us to become systematic and efficient in attacking a whole system that has been trampling families’ rights for too long.

I’m creating a new vehicle to enable the system we need to accomplish these ends. Essentially we need to gather key bits of information from every person within our constituency, to begin sorting out the potential classes of litigants and joinder of claims.

The information we need is straightforward and pretty simple:

Basic personal information: name, home address, email and phone;

A very succinct description of the facts giving rise to your own claim;

The specific Constitutional rights you would assert to be violated;

A very brief statement of the remedy you believe would resolve your own issues.

As we learn where the commonality become individual situations can be clearly defined, we can then proceed to put together a class petition, and other claims, primarily in family court.

This is the beginning. We also need considerable help carrying out the tasks we must in order to succeed. So we need people to self-identify skills or abilities they have, i.e. legal research, IT skill, administrative support, database management and administration, etc. With a number of us working together, we will be able to attack the problem more quickly, in essence, to create a rapid response team and legal coalition of activists who will help move our mission forward at “all deliberate speed” – that’s a quote from the United States Supreme Court, by the way.

We also must keep in mind that reform won’t be achieved without costs. We need help with funding! If every person will contribute just what they can, we will reach our destiny sooner. If most of us will trade in a small fraction of what we would have to pay for other legal representation and chip in a few hundred dollars toward the costs, we will move ahead very far and very fast. If everyone of us contributes at least a few dollars, we will show the tribunals we face that we are committed, serious and irrepressible as a unit. If just a few people are able to step forward and fund the largest share of the costs, we will show those who would deprive us of our rights that we are entirely capable of taking them on step-by-step throughout intense litigation.

We can bring about the change we need through the civil rights litigation that may be the only avenue of hope for real change in the time we need. All of our children are growing up fast. As each day passes, we lose one day in their tender young lives to play the roles we should in helping them be the people we want them to be, and keeping the relationships with their parents in tact in the way they should be able.

Forms will be added to the site very soon. In the meantime, please do not hesitate to reach our office via email at: info@reformfamilynow.org. Tomorrow’s a new day with much hope and expectation! We hope to hear from you soon.

De Facto Parents

Now children can have multiple legal parents without biology, adoption, or marriage.

By William C. Duncan
In Revolution, Herbert Jacob described how one of the most significant changes to family law in the 20th century, no-fault divorce, began in California and spread through the states with very little public debate or controversy. This remarkable transformation was presented, and largely accepted, as routine policymaking in the domain of legal experts.

Similarly, a revolution in the legal understanding of parenthood seems to have quietly begun with little or no public debate or discussion. This dramatically transformative development is the statutory recognition of “de facto” parenthood — the notion that an unrelated individual (usually the unmarried partner of a biological parent, but potentially any adult) can be designated as the legal “parent” of a child by virtue of an agreement with a biological or adoptive parent, or even just a relationship with the child. In some cases, three or more people may be designated “parents” of the same child. While a handful of state courts have endorsed the idea in the context of disputes between same-sex couples jointly raising children, not until very recently has a legislature endorsed it.

This year, the District of Columbia Council passed a law allowing biological parents’ registered domestic partners to be presumed parents, and to be listed as such on the children’s birth certificates. The law also allows a person to be legally designated a parent if he consents in writing to the artificial inseminationof his partner, or if he “hold[s] out” the child as his own—that is, presents the child as his to others. (D.C. already had a law allowing people to sue for child custody if they could show they had acted as “de facto” parents (D.C. Code 16-831.01).)

Then, last month, the Delaware legislature went even farther when it enacted legislation giving state courts the ability to designate a non-parent as a “de facto” parent (with all the legal ramifications of parenthood) as long as the biological parent of a child “fosters” a “parent-like relationship” between the non-parent and the child, and as long as the “de facto” parent has acted like a parent and bonded with the child in a way that is “parental in nature.”

The Delaware law completely untethers legal parentage from biology, marriage, adoption, and even the relationship between the adults who are the child’s legal “parents.” It also abandons the binary nature of legal parenthood by allowing three or more adults to be designated “parents” of a child at the same time.

Like the no-fault revolution, de facto parenthood has its boosters, and they seem to be increasingly influential. Prof. Nancy Polikoff, who advocates the erasure of legal distinctions between households based on marriage and those based on other arrangements, has written extensively and approvingly of these developments and suggests that they ought to be more widely adopted. The prestigious American Law Institute has also endorsed the “de facto” parent idea in the context of the law regarding family breakups.

These changes, however, are radical. The default rules for establishing legal parenthood — which were nearly universally recognized until now — recognize individuals as parents based on (1) biological parenthood, (2) marriage to a parent, or (3) adoption. These clear laws advance the interests of children to know and be raised by their biological parents whenever possible. The one significant exception, adoption, largely imitates the biological mother-father model, thus allowing a child who cannot be raised by his own parents to at least be raised by a mother and father. By limiting the number of people who can claim parental authority, the default rules promote stability and consistency for children.

Existing law also ensures that when natural parents transfer their legal rights, there are “bright lines” governing the process. Thus, parental rights are only terminated when there is clear evidence of unfitness, or when a parent voluntarily relinquishes them through a formal procedure like adoption (including adoption by stepparents).

These rules also enhance children’s best interests because a biological tie between parents and children “increase[s] the likelihood that the parents would identify with the child and be willing to sacrifice for that child, and it would reduce the likelihood that either parent would abuse the child,” as Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur wrote in Growing Up with a Single Parent. It is clear that living with a cohabiting couple increases risks of abuse and maltreatment for children, and that unrelated males living with children are more likely to abuse those children.

It is also not hard to imagine the chaos likely to result when the relationship between three or more “de facto” parents breaks up and courts are called upon to dole out parental rights and responsibilities to each person. Children have a hard enough time navigating between two worlds after divorce. Imagine the difficulty of being shuttled between the homes of a mother, her former partner, a sperm donor, his partner, etc.

Perhaps most fundamentally, these trends treat children as acquisitions, ignoring their needs for relationships with their parents and for substitute arrangements when those relationships are disrupted. The idea of de facto parenthood legally facilitates the creation of motherless or fatherless homes, based not on children’s needs but on adult desires. In adopting these laws, states are saying that parentage can be created by a bargain between two or more adults.

Needless to say, these developments and their philosophical underpinnings should be met with stiff opposition. That is likely only if people are aware such developments are taking place. That has not been the case to this point. As the promoters of “de facto” parenthood begin to take their arguments to other legislatures, there must be a more robust debate and response. Our children deserve at least that much.

The Evolution of Divorce

In 1969, Governor Ronald Reagan of California made what he later admitted was one of the biggest mistakes of his political life. Seeking to eliminate the strife and deception often associated with the legal regime of fault-based divorce, Reagan signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce bill. The new law eliminated the need for couples to fabricate spousal wrongdoing in pursuit of a divorce; indeed, one likely reason for Reagan’s decision to sign the bill was that his first wife, Jane Wyman, had unfairly accused him of “mental cruelty” to obtain a divorce in 1948. But no-fault divorce also gutted marriage of its legal power to bind husband and wife, allowing one spouse to dissolve a marriage for any reason — or for no reason at all.

In the decade and a half that followed, virtually every state in the Union followed California’s lead and enacted a no-fault divorce law of its own. This legal transformation was only one of the more visible signs of the divorce revolution then sweeping the United States: From 1960 to 1980, the divorce rate more than doubled — from 9.2 divorces per 1,000 married women to 22.6 divorces per 1,000 married women. This meant that while less than 20% of couples who married in 1950 ended up divorced, about 50% of couples who married in 1970 did. And approximately half of the children born to married parents in the 1970s saw their parents part, compared to only about 11% of those born in the 1950s.

In the years since 1980, however, these trends have not continued on straight upward paths, and the story of divorce has grown increasingly complicated. In the case of divorce, as in so many others, the worst consequences of the social revolution of the 1960s and ’70s are now felt disproportionately by the poor and less educated, while the wealthy elites who set off these transformations in the first place have managed to reclaim somewhat healthier and more stable habits of married life. This imbalance leaves our cultural and political elites less well attuned to the magnitude of social dysfunction in much of American society, and leaves the most vulnerable Americans — especially children living in poor and working-class communities — even worse off than they would otherwise be.

THE RISE OF DIVORCE

The divorce revolution of the 1960s and ’70s was over-determined. The nearly universal introduction of no-fault divorce helped to open the floodgates, especially because these laws facilitated unilateral divorce and lent moral legitimacy to the dissolution of marriages. The sexual revolution, too, fueled the marital tumult of the times: Spouses found it easier in the Swinging Seventies to find extramarital partners, and came to have higher, and often unrealistic, expectations of their marital relationships. Increases in women’s employment as well as feminist consciousness-raising also did their part to drive up the divorce rate, as wives felt freer in the late ’60s and ’70s to leave marriages that were abusive or that they found unsatisfying.

The anti-institutional tenor of the age also meant that churches lost much of their moral authority to reinforce the marital vow. It didn’t help that many mainline Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders were caught up in the zeitgeist, and lent explicit or implicit support to the divorce revolution sweeping across American society. This accomodationist mentality was evident in a 1976 pronouncement issued by the United Methodist Church, the largest mainline Protestant denomination in America. The statement read in part:

In marriages where the partners are, even after thoughtful reconsideration and counsel, estranged beyond reconciliation, we recognize divorce and the right of divorced persons to remarry, and express our concern for the needs of the children of such unions. To this end we encourage an active, accepting, and enabling commitment of the Church and our society to minister to the needs of divorced persons.

Most important, the psychological revolution of the late ’60s and ’70s, which was itself fueled by a post-war prosperity that allowed people to give greater attention to non-material concerns, played a key role in reconfiguring men and women’s views of marriage and family life. Prior to the late 1960s, Americans were more likely to look at marriage and family through the prisms of duty, obligation, and sacrifice. A successful, happy home was one in which intimacy was an important good, but by no means the only one in view. A decent job, a well-maintained home, mutual spousal aid, child-rearing, and shared religious faith were seen almost universally as the goods that marriage and family life were intended to advance.

But the psychological revolution’s focus on individual fulfillment and personal growth changed all that. Increasingly, marriage was seen as a vehicle for a self-oriented ethic of romance, intimacy, and fulfillment. In this new psychological approach to married life, one’s primary obligation was not to one’s family but to one’s self; hence, marital success was defined not by successfully meeting obligations to one’s spouse and children but by a strong sense of subjective happiness in marriage — usually to be found in and through an intense, emotional relationship with one’s spouse. The 1970s marked the period when, for many Americans, a more institutional model of marriage gave way to the “soul-mate model” of marriage.

Of course, the soul-mate model was much more likely to lead couples to divorce court than was the earlier institutional model of marriage. Now, those who felt they were in unfulfilling marriages also felt obligated to divorce in order to honor the newly widespread ethic of expressive individualism. As social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead has observed of this period, “divorce was not only an individual right but also a psychological resource. The dissolution of marriage offered the chance to make oneself over from the inside out, to refurbish and express the inner self, and to acquire certain valuable psychological assets and competencies, such as initiative, assertiveness, and a stronger and better self-image.”

But what about the children? In the older, institutional model of marriage, parents were supposed to stick together for their sake. The view was that divorce could leave an indelible emotional scar on children, and would also harm their social and economic future. Yet under the new soul-mate model of marriage, divorce could be an opportunity for growth not only for adults but also for their offspring. The view was that divorce could protect the emotional welfare of children by allowing their parents to leave marriages in which they felt unhappy. In 1962, as Whitehead points out in her book The Divorce Culture, about half of American women agreed with the idea that “when there are children in the family parents should stay together even if they don’t get along.” By 1977, only 20% of American women held this view.

At the height of the divorce revolution in the 1970s, many scholars, therapists, and journalists served as enablers of this kind of thinking. These elites argued that children were resilient in the face of divorce; that children could easily find male role models to replace absent fathers; and that children would be happier if their parents were able to leave unhappy marriages. In 1979, one prominent scholar wrote in the Journal of Divorce that divorce even held “growth potential” for mothers, as they could enjoy “increased personal autonomy, a new sense of competence and control, [and the] development of better relationships with [their] children.” And in 1974’s The Courage to Divorce, social workers Susan Gettleman and Janet Markowitz argued that boys need not be harmed by the absence of their fathers: “When fathers are not available, friends, relatives, teachers and counselors can provide ample opportunity for youngsters to model themselves after a like-sexed adult.”

Thus, by the time the 1970s came to a close, many Americans — rich and poor alike — had jettisoned the institutional model of married life that prioritized the welfare of children, and which sought to discourage divorce in all but the most dire of circumstances. Instead, they embraced the soul-mate model of married life, which prioritized the emotional welfare of adults and gave moral permission to divorce for virtually any reason.

THE MORNING AFTER

Thirty years later, the myth of the good divorce has not stood up well in the face of sustained social scientific inquiry — especially when one considers the welfare of children exposed to their parents’ divorces.

Since 1974, about 1 million children per year have seen their parents divorce — and children who are exposed to divorce are two to three times more likely than their peers in intact marriages to suffer from serious social or psychological pathologies. In their book Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps, sociologists Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur found that 31% of adolescents with divorced parents dropped out of high school, compared to 13% of children from intact families. They also concluded that 33% of adolescent girls whose parents divorced became teen mothers, compared to 11% of girls from continuously married families. And McLanahan and her colleagues have found that 11% of boys who come from divorced families end up spending time in prison before the age of 32, compared to 5% of boys who come from intact homes.

Research also indicates that remarriage is no salve for children wounded by divorce. Indeed, as sociologist Andrew Cherlin notes in his important new book, The Marriage-Go-Round, “children whose parents have remarried do not have higher levels of well-being than children in lone-parent families.” The reason? Often, the establishment of a step-family results in yet another move for a child, requiring adjustment to a new caretaker and new step-siblings — all of which can be difficult for children, who tend to thrive on stability.

The divorce revolution’s collective consequences for children are striking. Taking into account both divorce and non-marital childbearing, sociologist Paul Amato estimates that if the United States enjoyed the same level of family stability today as it did in 1960, the nation would have 750,000 fewer children repeating grades, 1.2 million fewer school suspensions, approximately 500,000 fewer acts of teenage delinquency, about 600,000 fewer kids receiving therapy, and approximately 70,000 fewer suicides every year. As Amato concludes, turning back the family-­stability clock just a few decades could significantly improve the lives of many children.

Skeptics confronted with this kind of research often argue that it is unfair to compare children of divorce to children from intact, married households. They contend that it is the conflict that precedes the divorce, rather than the divorce itself, that is likely to be particularly traumatic for children. Amato’s work suggests that the skeptics have a point: In cases where children are exposed to high levels of conflict — like domestic violence or screaming matches between parents — they do seem to do better if their parents part.

But more than two-thirds of all parental divorces do not involve such highly conflicted marriages. And “unfortunately, these are the very divorces that are most likely to be stressful for children,” as Amato and Alan Booth, his colleague at Penn State University, point out. When children see their parents divorce because they have simply drifted apart — or because one or both parents have become unhappy or left to pursue another ­partner — the kids’ faith in love, commitment, and marriage is often shattered. In the wake of their parents’ divorce, children are also likely to experience a family move, marked declines in their family income, a stressed-out single mother, and substantial periods of paternal absence — all factors that put them at risk. In other words, the clear majority of divorces involving children in America are not in the best interests of the children.

Not surprisingly, the effects of divorce on adults are more ambiguous. From an emotional and social perspective, about 20% of divorced adults find their lives enhanced and another 50% seem to suffer no long-term ill effects, according to research by psychologist Mavis Hetherington. Adults who initiated a divorce are especially likely to report that they are flourishing afterward, or are at least doing just fine.

Spouses who were unwilling parties to a unilateral divorce, however, tend to do less well. And the ill effects of divorce for adults tend to fall disproportionately on the shoulders of fathers. Since approximately two-thirds of divorces are legally initiated by women, men are more likely than women to be divorced against their will. In many cases, these men have not engaged in egregious marital misconduct such as abuse, adultery, or substance abuse. They feel mistreated by their ex-wives and by state courts that no longer take into account marital “fault” when making determinations about child custody, child support, and the division of marital property. Yet in the wake of a divorce, these men will nevertheless often lose their homes, a substantial share of their monthly incomes, and regular contact with their children. For these men, and for women caught in similar circumstances, the sting of an unjust divorce can lead to downward emotional spirals, difficulties at work, and serious deteriorations in the quality of their relationships with their children.

Looking beyond the direct effects of divorce on adults and children, it is also important to note the ways in which widespread divorce has eroded the institution of marriage — particularly, its assault on the quality, prevalence, and stability of marriage in American life.

In the 1970s, proponents of easy divorce argued that the ready availability of divorce would boost the quality of married life, as abused, unfulfilled, or otherwise unhappy spouses were allowed to leave their marriages. Had they been correct, we would expect to see that Americans’ reports of marital quality had improved during and after the 1970s. Instead, marital quality fell during the ’70s and early ’80s. In the early 1970s, 70% of married men and 67% of married women reported being very happy in their marriages; by the early ’80s, these figures had fallen to 63% for men and 62% for women. So marital quality dropped even as divorce rates were reaching record highs.

What happened? It appears that average marriages suffered during this time, as widespread divorce undermined ordinary couples’ faith in marital permanency and their ability to invest financially and emotionally in their marriages — ultimately casting clouds of doubt over their relationships. For instance, one study by economist Betsey Stevenson found that investments in marital partnerships declined in the wake of no-fault divorce laws. Specifically, she found that newlywed couples in states that passed no-fault divorce were about 10% less likely to support a spouse through college or graduate school and were 6% less likely to have a child together. Ironically, then, the widespread availability of easy divorce not only enabled “bad” marriages to be weeded out, but also made it more difficult for “good” marriages to take root and flourish.

Second, marriage rates have fallen and cohabitation rates have surged in the wake of the divorce revolution, as men and women’s faith in marriage has been shaken. From 1960 to 2007, the percentage of American women who were married fell from 66% to 51%, and the percentage of men who were married fell from 69% to 55%. Yet at the same time, the number of cohabiting couples increased fourteen-fold — from 439,000 to more than 6.4 million. Because of these increases in cohabitation, about 40% of American children will spend some time in a cohabiting union; 20% of babies are now born to cohabiting couples. And because cohabiting unions are much less stable than marriages, the vast majority of the children born to cohabiting couples will see their parents break up by the time they turn 15.

A recent Bowling Green State University study of the motives for cohabitation found that young men and women who choose to cohabit are seeking alternatives to marriage and ways of testing a relationship to see if it might be safely transformed into a marriage — with both rationales clearly shaped by a fear of divorce. One young man told the researchers that living together allows you to “get to know the person and their habits before you get married. So that way, you won’t have to get divorced.” Another said that an advantage of cohabitation is that you “don’t have to go through the divorce process if you do want to break up, you don’t have to pay lawyers and have to deal with splitting everything and all that jazz.”

My own research confirms the connection between divorce and cohabitation in America. Specifically, data from the General Social Survey indicate that adult children of divorce are 61% more likely than adult children from married families to endorse the notion that it is a “good idea for a couple who intend to get married to live together first.” Likewise, adult children of divorce are 47% more likely to be currently cohabiting, compared to those who were raised in intact, married families. Thus divorce has played a key role in reducing marriage and increasing cohabitation, which now exists as a viable competitor to marriage in the organization of sex, intimacy, childbearing, and even child-rearing.

Third, the divorce revolution has contributed to an intergenerational cycle of divorce. Work by demographer Nicholas Wolfinger indicates that the adult children of divorce are now 89% more likely to divorce themselves, compared to adults who were raised in intact, married families. Children of divorce who marry other children of divorce are especially likely to end up divorced, according to Wolfinger’s work. Of course, the reason children of divorce — especially children of low-conflict divorce — are more likely to end their marriages is precisely that they have often learned all the wrong lessons about trust, commitment, mutual sacrifice, and fidelity from their parents.

THE DIVORCE DIVIDE

Clearly, the divorce revolution of the 1960s and ’70s left a poisonous legacy. But what has happened since? Where do we stand today on the question of marriage and divorce? A survey of the landscape presents a decidedly mixed portrait of contemporary married life in America.

The good news is that, on the whole, divorce has declined since 1980 and marital happiness has largely stabilized. The divorce rate fell from a historic high of 22.6 divorces per 1,000 married women in 1980 to 17.5 in 2007. In real terms, this means that slightly more than 40% of contemporary first marriages are likely to end in divorce, down from approximately 50% in 1980. Perhaps even more important, recent declines in divorce suggest that a clear majority of children who are now born to married couples will grow up with their married mothers and fathers.

Similarly, the decline in marital happiness associated with the tidal wave of divorce in the 1960s and ’70s essentially stopped more than two decades ago. Men’s marital happiness hovered around 63% from the early 1980s to the mid-2000s, while women’s marital happiness fell just a bit, from 62% in the early 1980s to 60% in the mid-2000s.

This good news can be explained largely by three key factors. First, the age at first marriage has risen. In 1970, the median age of marriage was 20.8 for women and 23.2 for men; in 2007, it was 25.6 for women and 27.5 for men. This means that fewer Americans are marrying when they are too immature to forge successful marriages. (It is true that some of the increase in age at first marriage is linked to cohabitation, but not the bulk of it.)

Second, the views of academic and professional experts about divorce and family breakdown have changed significantly in recent decades. Social-science data about the consequences of divorce have moved many scholars across the political spectrum to warn against continuing the divorce revolution, and to argue that intact families are essential, especially to the well-being of children. Here is a characteristic example, from a recent publication by a group of scholars at the Brookings Institution and Princeton University:

Marriage provides benefits both to children and to society. Although it was once possible to believe that the nation’s high rates of divorce, cohabitation, and nonmarital childbearing represented little more than lifestyle alternatives brought about by the freedom to pursue individual self-fulfillment, many analysts now believe that these individual choices can be damaging to the children who have no say in them and to the society that enables them.

Although certainly not all scholars, therapists, policymakers, and journalists would agree that contemporary levels of divorce and family breakdown are cause for worry, a much larger share of them expresses concern about the health of marriage in America — and about America’s high level of divorce — than did so in the 1970s. These views seep into the popular consciousness and influence behavior — just as they did in the 1960s and ’70s, when academic and professional experts carried the banner of the divorce revolution.

A third reason for the stabilization in divorce rates and marital happiness is not so heartening. Put simply, marriage is increasingly the preserve of the highly educated and the middle and upper classes. Fewer working-class and poor Americans are marrying nowadays in part because marriage is seen increasingly as a sort of status symbol: a sign that a couple has arrived both emotionally and financially, or is at least within range of the American Dream. This means that those who do marry today are more likely to start out enjoying the money, education, job security, and social skills that increase the probability of long-term marital success.

And this is where the bad news comes in. When it comes to divorce and marriage, America is increasingly divided along class and educational lines. Even as divorce in general has declined since the 1970s, what sociologist Steven Martin calls a “divorce divide” has also been growing between those with college degrees and those without (a distinction that also often translates to differences in income). The figures are quite striking: College-educated Americans have seen their divorce rates drop by about 30% since the early 1980s, whereas Americans without college degrees have seen their divorce rates increase by about 6%. Just under a quarter of college-educated couples who married in the early 1970s divorced in their first ten years of marriage, compared to 34% of their less-educated peers. Twenty years later, only 17% of college-­educated couples who married in the early 1990s divorced in their first ten years of marriage; 36% of less-educated couples who married in the early 1990s, however, divorced sometime in their first decade of marriage.

This growing divorce divide means that college-educated married couples are now about half as likely to divorce as their less-educated peers. Well-educated spouses who come from intact families, who enjoy annual incomes over $60,000, and who conceive their first child in ­wedlock — as many college-educated couples do — have exceedingly low rates of divorce.

Similar trends can be observed in measures of marital quality. For instance, if we look at married couples aged 18-60, 72% of spouses who were both college-educated and 65% of spouses who were both less-educated reported that they were “very happy” in their marriages in the 1970s, according to the General Social Survey. In the 2000s, marital happiness remained high among college-educated spouses, as 70% continued to report that they were “very happy” in their marriages. But marital happiness fell among less-educated spouses: Only 56% reported that they were “very happy” in their marriages in the 2000s.

These trends are mirrored in American illegitimacy statistics. Although one would never guess as much from the regular New York Times features on successful single women having children, non-marital childbearing is quite rare among college-educated women. According to a 2007 Child Trends study, only 7% of mothers with a college degree had a child outside of marriage, compared to more than 50% of mothers who had not gone to college.

So why are marriage and traditional child-rearing making a modest comeback in the upper reaches of society while they continue to unravel among those with less money and less education? Both cultural and economic forces are at work, each helping to widen the divorce and marriage divide in America.

First, while it was once the case that working-class and poor Americans held more conservative views of divorce than their middle- and upper-class peers, this is no longer so. For instance, a 2004 National Fatherhood Initiative poll of American adults aged 18-60 found that 52% of college-­educated Americans endorsed the norm that in the “absence of violence and extreme conflict, parents who have an unsatisfactory marriage should stay together until their children are grown.” But only 35% of less-educated Americans surveyed endorsed the same viewpoint.

Likewise, according to my analysis of the General Social Survey, in the 1970s only 36% of college-educated Americans thought divorce should be “more difficult to obtain than it is now,” compared to 46% of less-educated Americans. By the 2000s, 49% of college-educated Americans thought divorce laws should be tightened, compared to 48% of less-­educated ­Americans. Views of marriage have been growing more conservative among elites, but not among the poor and the less educated.

Second, the changing cultural meaning of marriage has also made it less necessary and less attractive to working-class and poor Americans. Prior to the 1960s, when the older, institutional model of marriage dominated popular consciousness, marriage was the only legitimate venue for having sex, bearing and raising children, and enjoying an intimate relationship. Moreover, Americans generally saw marriage as an institution that was about many more goods than a high-quality emotional relationship. Therefore, it made sense for all men and women — regardless of socioeconomic status — to get and stay married.

Yet now that the institutional model has lost its hold over the lives of American adults, sex, children, and intimacy can be had outside of ­marriage. All that remains unique to marriage today is the prospect of that high-quality emotional bond — the soul-mate model. As a result, marriage is now disproportionately appealing to wealthier, better-­educated couples, because less-educated, less-wealthy couples often do not have the emotional, social, and financial resources to enjoy a high-quality soul-mate marriage.

The qualitative research of sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, for instance, shows that lower-income couples are much more likely to struggle with conflict, infidelity, and substance abuse than their higher-income peers, especially as the economic position of working-class men has grown more precarious since the 1970s. Because of shifts away from industrial employment and toward service occupations, real wages and employment rates have dropped markedly for working-class men, but not for college-educated men. For instance, from 1973 to 2007, real wages of men with a college degree rose 18%; by contrast, the wages of high-school-educated men fell 11%. Likewise, in 1970, 96% of men aged 25-64 with high-school degrees or with college degrees were employed. By 2003, employment had fallen only to 93% for college-­educated men of working age. But for working-aged men with only high-school degrees, labor-force participation had fallen to 84%, according to research by economist Francine Blau. These trends indicate that less-educated men have, in economic terms, become much less attractive as providers for their female peers than have college-educated men.

In other words, the soul-mate model of marriage does not extend equal marital opportunities. It therefore makes sense that fewer poor Americans would take on the responsibilities of modern married life, knowing that they are unlikely to reap its rewards.

The emergence of the divorce and marriage divide in America exacerbates a host of other social problems. The breakdown of marriage in ­working-class and poor communities has played a major role in fueling poverty and inequality, for instance. Isabel Sawhill at the Brookings Institution has concluded that virtually all of the increase in child poverty in the United States since the 1970s can be attributed to family breakdown. Meanwhile, the dissolution of marriage in working-class and poor communities has also fueled the growth of government, as federal, state, and local governments spend more money on police, prisons, welfare, and court costs, trying to pick up the pieces of broken families. Economist Ben Scafidi recently found that the public costs of family breakdown exceed $112 billion a year.

Moreover, children in single-parent homes are more likely to be exposed to Hollywood’s warped vision of sex, relationships, and family life. For instance, a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that children in single-parent homes devote almost 45 minutes more per day to watching television than children in two-parent homes. Given the distorted nature of the popular culture’s family-related messages, and the unorthodox family relationships of celebrity role models, this means that children in single-parent families are even less likely to develop a healthy understanding of marriage and family life — and are therefore less likely to have a positive vision of their own marital future.

Thus, the fallout of America’s retreat from marriage has hit poor and working-class communities especially hard, with children on the lower end of the economic spectrum doubly disadvantaged by the material and marital circumstances of their parents.

STRENGHTENING MARRIAGE

There are no magic cures for the growing divorce divide in America. But a few modest policy measures could offer some much-needed help.

First, the states should reform their divorce laws. A return to fault-based divorce is almost certainly out of the question as a political matter, but some plausible common-sense reforms could nonetheless inject a measure of sanity into our nation’s divorce laws. States should combine a one-year waiting period for married parents seeking a divorce with programs that educate those parents about the likely social and emotional consequences of their actions for their children. State divorce laws should also allow courts to factor in spousal conduct when making decisions about alimony, child support, custody, and property division. In particular, spouses who are being divorced against their will, and who have not engaged in egregious misbehavior such as abuse, adultery, or abandonment, should be given preferential treatment by family courts. Such consideration would add a measure of justice to the current divorce process; it would also discourage some divorces, as spouses who would otherwise seek an easy exit might avoid a divorce that would harm them financially or limit their access to their children.

Second, Congress should extend the federal Healthy Marriage Initiative. In 2006, as part of President George W. Bush’s marriage initiative, Congress passed legislation allocating $100 million a year for five years to more than 100 programs designed to strengthen marriage and ­family ­relationships in America — especially among low-income couples. As Kathryn Edin of Harvard has noted, many of these programs are equipping poor and working-class couples with the relational skills that their better-educated peers rely upon to sustain their marriages. In the next year or two, many of these programs will be evaluated; the most successful programs serving poor and working-class communities should receive additional funding, and should be used as models for new programs to serve these communities. New ideas — like additional social-marketing campaigns on behalf of marriage, on the model of those undertaken to discourage smoking — should also be explored through the initiative.

Third, the federal government should expand the child tax credit. Raising children is expensive, and has become increasingly so, given rising college and health-care costs. Yet the real value of federal tax deductions for children has fallen considerably since the 1960s. To remedy this state of affairs, Ramesh Ponnuru and Robert Stein have proposed expanding the current child tax credit from $1,000 to $5,000 and making it fully refundable against both income and payroll taxes. A reform along those lines would provide a significant measure of financial relief to working-class and middle-class families, and would likely strengthen their increasingly fragile marriages.

Of course, none of these reforms of law and policy alone is likely to exercise a transformative influence on the quality and stability of marriage in America. Such fixes must be accompanied by changes in the wider culture. Parents, churches, schools, public officials, and the entertainment industry will have to do a better job of stressing the merits of a more institutional model of marriage. This will be particularly important for poor and working-class young adults, who are drifting away from marriage the fastest.

This is a tall order, to say the least. But if our society is genuinely interested in protecting and improving the welfare of children — especially children in our nation’s most vulnerable communities — we must strengthen marriage and reduce the incidence of divorce in America. The unthinkable alternative is a nation divided more and more by class and marital ­status, and children doubly disadvantaged by poverty and single parenthood. Surely no one believes that such a state of affairs is in the national interest.

W. Bradford Wilcox is the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Institute for American Values.

A ban on divorce is what most children would introduce if they ruled the world, according to a poll.

By Alastair Jamieson
Published: 8:52PM GMT 14 Dec 2008

Marital splits were also named the second-worst thing in the world in the survey of under-10s, behind being fat.

The annual survey of 1,600 youngsters found X Factor judge Simon Cowell was more famous than God or Her Majesty the Queen and that the very best things in the world are ‘good looks’.

Asked what rules they would make if they were king or queen of the world, most children replied they would ban divorce – the first time it has come at the top of the list.

Bullying would also be banned and has risen to the number two slot from number three last year and number five the year before.

Around two thirds of the children who took part said they were happy, but 27 per cent were not and a further seven per cent were unsure.

Over 80 per cent of the children questioned thought they would probably marry when they grow up although 17 per cent gave a definite “no” on the subject.

Sixty six per cent wanted to have children, with most of them stopping at one or two. Nearly one third were unsure about becoming parents.

Saturday remains the best day of the week for most, because there is no school and they can stay up late to watch television.

Nearly all of those surveyed had a best friend who was kind, but many said they were in love – the number two reason for having a best friend this year, rising from number five last year and seven the year before.

Being fat topped the list of worst things in the world, rising from number three last year. It was number nine in 2006, but was not featured in the 2005 list.

The nationwide research was carried out by Luton First, sponsors and organisers of the fourth annual National Kids’ Day.

Patricia Murchie, of Luton First, said: “It seems clear that many pre-teens are more concerned than ever with their looks and weight – possibly reflecting media images of glamour, and new educational initiatives in nutrition and healthy eating.”

She said: “This particular age group has some very clear ideas on how the world could be changed for the better, but are very rarely given the opportunity to express them.”

Throughout history, Christians have fought against countless social evils from slavery to child labor and these battles inevitably began with a campaign of sustained public persuasion that exposed the hidden evils to a public largely unaware. Similarly, no-fault divorce has become so commonplace that its evil is either obscured or ignored. But the availability of no-fault divorce has served to increase family dissolution at a rate greater than ever before in history; furthermore, it undermines the institution of marriage itself, perhaps more so than any other single factor in history. We would not be standing on the brink of same-sex marriage were it not for the corrosive effect upon marriage-as-an-institution that followed the divorce revolution.

Constitutional and family law attorney J. Shelby Sharpe says, “No-fault is national catastrophe. Anything which overturns the order or systems of things whereby families are destroyed and the whole of society adversely affected is by definition a catastrophe.”

You may be surprised to learn that the initial efforts to advance no-fault divorce legislation were underwritten by Hugh Hefner through the Playboy Foundation, which financed an army of young lawyers working to advance these antifamily policies. Let’s see…America’s largest pornographer working to rewrite public policy related to the family? There’s something seriously wrong with this picture! Alfred Kinsey also played an instrumental role in reducing these legal protections by falsely reporting that adultery was commonplace in most marriages. This reduced the stigma associated with adultery and ultimately served as the basis for eliminating all laws against adultery. Hefner and Kinsey both saw marriage as the final barrier to sexual freedom and thus determined to remove its inhibiting influence upon unrestrained sexual activity.

Cheap divorce (Credit: Kevin Dooley)

No-fault divorce is much more than just divorce; it is a legal tyranny that denies the fundamental right of due process to a defendant. Prior to no-fault divorce, the party seeking divorce (plaintiff) was required, by law, to demonstrate cause on the part of the other party (defendant) prior to dissolving the marriage, dividing the family’s assets, and destroying the two-parent structure essential for children. These measures provided strong legal protections—primarily to women and children who might otherwise find themselves abandoned by husbands and fathers who simply sought “greener pastures.” (You might think me overly hard on men here. Granted, both men and women can be guilty of abandoning marriages; however, statistically speaking, women and children are most often the victims.)

Under the system prior to no-fault divorce, the state was limited in its actions and intrusion into the private affairs of the family except in those cases in which one of the parties committed a legally recognized offense against the other. In the wake of no-fault divorce, the state has been given unprecedented access into and unconstitutional authority over what was previously sacrosanct: the family. Historically, the law regarded the family as a preserve of privacy that was largely off-limits to the government. It was what Supreme Court Justice Byron White (1962–1993) called the “realm of family life, which the state cannot enter.”

What is most shocking about no-fault divorce is the inherent unconstitutionality of it all, a direct violation of human rights. A retired circuit court judge writes, “To the characterization of no-fault divorce laws as both ungodly and inhumane I would add unconstitutional as well.” In my conversation with attorney J. Shelby Sharpe he was confident that if a case involving no-fault divorce were ever brought before the U.S. Supreme Court it would no doubt be ruled unconstitutional and no-fault divorce abolished!

One of our most fundamental protections secured by the U.S. Constitution is the right to due process, which secures the right of an individual to be heard regarding issues of life, liberty, or property. This means that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, property, or of any right granted him by statute, unless the matter involved is first adjudicated or ruled against him at trial.

No-fault divorce completely usurps the defendant’s constitutional right to due process. In the case of Judith Brumbaugh, author of Judge, Please Don’t Strike That Gavel on My Marriage, with whom I spoke, her husband of twenty years had an adulterous affair, formed a relationship with the other woman, and decided that he no longer wanted to be married. Under the no-fault procedure he was able to file for divorce claiming that their marriage was “irretrievably broken.” Judith contested this claim, hoping to preserve her marriage; however the no-fault procedure ultimately gave her husband and the court the right to deny her due process. She was, in essence, charged with a crime, found guilty, and sentenced without ever being heard. The marriage contract was unilaterally dissolved.

Judith lost her home, her children, and her husband; she was left nearly destitute from legal expenses and utterly without recourse—which is legally impossible in every other contractual obligation in this country! And yet in the most important contractual obligation in society, under no-fault divorce the plaintiff is able to break his or her contractual obligation without the right of due process being given to the other party in the contract. The defendant’s life can be ruined, her liberty restrained in countless ways, and her property taken away by the courts. I know, and I’m sure you do as well, too many women and children who have suffered similar results.

This is a travesty of justice that affects more than a million families each and every year, with an annual related cost to taxpayers of more than $48 billion! This cost doesn’t even begin to consider the secondary societal effects of family dissolution upon crime rates, welfare rolls, and the emotional and psychological effects upon the children of divorce. No-fault divorce has created an easy divorce culture, which, according to Maggie Gallagher, an affiliate scholar at the Institute for American Values and a nationally syndicated columnist, “demotes marriage from a binding relation into something best described as cohabitation with insurance benefits.”

No-fault divorce is a social and legal atrocity that needs to be abolished both for the sake of families and children that have, for too long, been subjected to the tyrannical actions of family courts, and because it has encouraged, through law, radical selfishness on the part of narcissistic, self-indulgent spouses. What must be understood by Christians is that no-fault divorce functions as a direct enemy of the gospel of the kingdom by opposing the in-breaking reign of God and his desires for the family.

I will be sharing more on this and what you can do in the months ahead

S. Michael Craven is the President of the Center for Christ & Culture. Michael is the author of Uncompromised Faith (Navpress).The Center for Christ & Culture is dedicated to renewal within the Church and works to equip Christians with an intelligent and thoroughly Christian approach to matters of culture in order to demonstrate the relevance of Christianity to all of life. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, the teaching ministry of S. Michael Craven, visit the Center for Christ & Culture.

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Marriage: What MattersToo many Republicans are blind to what is at stake in the marriage-law debate.

By Robert W. Patterson

Fifteen years ago, in his first book, Dead Right, David Frum identified several challenges facing Republicans. He cited the “fundamental contradiction” of William Weld, at the time governor of Massachusetts, who thought he could be a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. Frum recounted how this Republican blue-blood, unable to reconcile the two positions, evolved into a thoroughgoing liberal who pushed through huge budget increases, in much the same way that John Stuart Mill, who objected to the social conservatism of his day, ended up a socialist.

Had this disconnect been limited to one governor in one state, Frum’s point might have become an historical footnote. Yet from Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey to Arnold Schwarzenegger of California — not to mention political operatives like John McCain’s campaign manager, Steve Schmidt — influential voices continue to maintain that the Weld synthesis not only is plausible but also holds electoral promise. These Republicans resent the presence of social conservatives in the party and, even more, the fact that in 30 states social conservatives have succeeded in defending the legal status of matrimony against elites who want America to be more like socially liberal Europe.

Even many Republicans with no beef against social conservatives don’t consider marriage a winning issue. But as Maggie Gallagher pointed out recently in National Review (August 10), public support for the traditional legal definition of marriage remains strong, and indeed has increased — to nearly 60 percent — since Perez Hilton heaped public scorn on beauty queen Carrie Prejean in April.

So why aren’t the geniuses at the Republican National Committee taking advantage of this issue, in Gallagher’s words, “to elect our friends and defeat our enemies”? The Democrats surely understand the game, yet Michael Steele has remained silent on the marriage battles taking place in various states this year. Nor has he sought any photo-op to demonstrate solidarity with African-American clergymen who are behind the effort to allow the voters — and not the city council — to determine the legal definition of marriage in the District of Columbia.

What drives the shortsightedness is that far too many in the GOP — from the business crowd to the Washington insiders, from the conservative think tanks to the talking heads on Fox News — have been slow to learn that social conservatism and economic conservatism are joined at the hip. Without the social ideal of marriage between husband and wife, described by Wendell Berry as “the fundamental connection without which nothing holds,” the prospects for limited government, civil society independent of the state, and a robust, free-market economy go out the window.

As we can see from what has happened in Old Europe, state creation of same-sex marriage has seriously undermined marriage as a social institution. Data from the World Values Survey and the International Social Survey Programme show that countries with same-sex marriage demonstrate the lowest levels of support for traditional marriage. Citizens in these countries are significantly less likely than their counterparts in the U.S. and Australia to agree that adults who desire children should wed; they are significantly more likely to approve of cohabitation without marital intentions and to consider divorce to be the best solution to marital problems.

According to NRO contributor Stanley Kurtz, marriage, and especially married parenthood, are disappearing in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, countries that adopted same-sex marriage between 1989 and 1994. Kurtz says this “culture-shifting event” has pushed rates of unwed childbearing over the top in Scandinavia. Today, births to unwed mothers exceed 55 percent of total births in Sweden and 50 percent in Norway. In Denmark, more than 60 percent of first-born children have unwed parents.

Europe’s dismissal of the social ideal of traditional marriage comes right out of the Marxist playbook. Karl Marx considered matrimony to be as evil as private property, and he called for “the abolition of the family” in a post-capitalist society, with children being raised communally rather than by their married mothers and fathers.

If the Left understands the relation between the family order and the economic order, why don’t Republicans? Even language affirms the connection: The term economy originates from a Greek word, oikos, which means household. Adam Smith noted the interplay between marriage and the market in TheWealth of Nations. Like Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835, the Scottish moral philosopher was impressed with what he saw in America in 1776. He noticed how men and women on this side of the Atlantic were twice as likely to marry — and at younger ages — and had twice as many children as their European counterparts.

Smith did not consider all living arrangements equal; he predicted that the exalted status of marriage and children in the colonies would pay economic dividends. Despite Britain’s superior wealth at the time, Smith saw North America “advancing with much greater rapidity to the further acquisition of riches.” He even claimed that “the most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase in the number of its inhabitants,” which he linked to a factor even then considered bourgeois, “a numerous family of children.”

More recently, Gary Becker has explained why natural marriage holds such promise. His Treatise on the Family asserts that the household anchored on the union of husband and wife is the most productive and efficient of all living arrangements — including single, cohabitating, and divorced — largely because of the sexual division of labor that maximizes production in the market and in the home. He further claims that homosexual unions fall short, as “generally they have a less extensive division of labor and less marital-specific capital than heterosexual marriages” and do not produce what really matters, children.

Mae West used to say, “A man in the home is worth two in the street.” From instilling the rules of cooperation, to modeling the relation between the sexes, to nurturing human and social capital, to helping adults and children think long-term, to solving the universal problem of dependency, marriage does what no other social institution can do. Because it predates society and the state, wedlock actually creates, builds, and renews society. Same-sex marriage — a construct that depends on the state for its very existence — can never duplicate these functions.

Of course, insisting that marriage law should reflect what nature, history, and reason affirm risks offending not so much homosexualsas cultural elites who care little about America. For these reasons, the effort to preserve a social institution that is a critical part of American exceptionalism, including this country’s economic prowess, deserves greater support from the GOP establishment and from Republican business interests. Given how a rejection of the marriage ideal would make the U.S. look like Europe, the stakes could not be higher.

— Robert W. Patterson, a research fellow at the Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society, served in the George W. Bush administration as a speechwriter at the Small Business Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services.

What we teach about the true meaning of marriage will determine a great deal about our fate,

would do a better job than this one does of teaching its readers about marriage (Time, 7/2/09). Caitlin Flanagan gets a few of the high points right, but ignores others entirely. Maybe there’s an unwritten rule that I don’t know about that forbids mention of certain things.

What Flanagan gets right are things like the value of marriage and a stable home environment to children’s wellbeing. She understands as well that much of our divorce culture stems from a attitude of hedonism that’s been learned over the past few decades. Adults often seem incapable of seeing and acting on the most obvious truth – that divorce harms children and that they benefit from having two parents to raise them. Absent the direst circumstances, adults who have made the choice to have children, should stick together and stick with the children until they themselves become adults. After that, divorce is fine.

So Flanagan gets the basics, but her context goes a long way toward undermining her thesis. That context is male infidelity. The article starts off with photos of various high-profile male philanderers – Eliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford, John Edwards and, yes, Jon Gosselin. In the text, she tosses in John Ensign, just to balance the ticket, I suppose.

So what Flanagan is suggesting, without coming out and saying it explicitly, is that the “me first” culture that’s destroying marriage is all about the narcisism of men. Never does she mention a high-profile female adulterer. Nowhere does she cite statistics that show that, while married men stray more than do married women, the difference is a matter of a few percentage points. Depending on which study you prefer, something like 23-28% of married men have extramarital affairs while 15-22% of married women do. In Flanagan’s piece no women do.

Nor does she mention that most marriages in which one or the other partner commits adultery remain intact. So sexual infidelity, as wrong as it is, as painful as it is, as self-centered as it is, has little to do with the failure of marriage in America.

Flanagan champions marriage for the many good reasons we all know, but, while bemoaning the fragility of that most important of institutions, she never asks why it’s become fragile. Doubtless the answers to that question are many and complex, but why not give it a shot? Why not at least try?

Well, maybe it’s because doing so would inevitably lead where Flanagan and Time fear to tread. Maybe it would violate that unwritten rule I mentioned earlier. That marriage is in such ill repute, might conceivably force us to ask how it got that way. After all, 50 years ago, it wasn’t. So what happened?

Well, one thing that happened was feminism.

I’m aware of course that many feminists are married. Gloria Steinem is; Katha Pollitt is; most of my female feminist friends are. But one of the most consistent themes of feminist discourse over the past 40 years has been that marriage is the seat of male subjugation of women. According to many feminist writers (see, e.g. Catharine MacKinnon) over the years, marriage is at best unnecessary and at worst dangerous to women. And if men are dangerous to women, they’re no less so to children, so the story goes.

Never mind that essentially every word of those claims is directly contradicted by massive amounts of social science. Never mind that, whatever may be true about women, men, fish and bicycles, children need their fathers. And never mind that children have more to fear from their mothers than from their fathers.

Never mind all that because, for decades, popular culture absorbed and repeated most of those feminist claims producing TV programs, movies, books (fiction and non-fiction), short stories, etc. which hewed to the feminist narrative that men are dangerous to women and children and, in any case, incompetent to – and uninterested in – caring for children.

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc?

No, that’s not my argument. My argument is simply this: I find it highly coincidental that, after decades of denigrating men, fathers and the institution of marriage, that the institution of marriage is now so shaky. Maybe the one had nothing to do with the other. Maybe if second wave feminism had never happened, marriage would still be on the rocks. About that we’ll never know. But what we do know is what did happen. Anyone who chooses to believe that the denigration of marriage by feminists and taken up by popular culture had nothing to do with its current status is welcome to that opinion.

Flanagan, not content to ignore feminism’s contibution to the decline of marriage, moves right on to ignore the law’s. I’ve detailed elsewhere the many, many ways in which family law separates children from fathers and thus tends to obviate the reason for marriage. So I won’t go into that again. But what I will say is this: we know the one thing that will do more than anything else to discourage it – shared parenting.

Women file for about 70% of divorces in the United States. They do so because they know to a virtual certainty that they will retain physical custody of their children. That was the finding of a massive study done in 2000 by Margaret Brinig and Douglas Allen of over 40,000 divorce cases in four states. They learned that far more than any other factor encouraging divorce was the fact that the woman knew she would not lose contact with her children. What’s also true is that divorce rates drop in jurisdictions that adopt some version of shared parenting. Establish shared parenting as the law, and, in addition to all its other benefits, watch the divorce rate drop.

But Caitlin Flanagan reports none of that.

Think of what might happen if we devoted even half the resources to telling the truth about fathers and children that we devoted to disinformation about them over the past 40 years. Combine that with making real efforts – like establishing the presumption of shared parenting in all 50 states – to ensure maximal continued contact between fathers and children post-divorce. Do those two things and let’s see what the state of marriage is in this country.

Thanks to Jed for the heads-up.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 30th, 2009 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Marriage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Children are better off with both parents there

The Daily News

I read your article about our federal justice minister making comments to the Canadian Bar Association meeting in Dublin, Ireland.

Rob Nicholson is either being misquoted or appears to have little understanding of the legal effects of the divorce process.

It is not about the best interests of children versus fathering rights. It is in the best interests of children to have both parents in their lives, both father and mother. This fact has been adequately researched and documented for years.

Children perform better in all areas of their lives when they have a mother and father present in their upbringing. This is not to say that single-parent families are deficient, simply a statement about the ideal situation.

MP Maurice Vellacott’s Bill C-422 to entrench equal parenting in the Divorce Act is simply to make changes that Canadian society has overwhelmingly supported by 80-90% in numerous opinion polls since the early 1990s.

This bill does not reduce protection for children, but clarifies what the best interests of children are and that equal parenting needs to be the starting point unless other factors are existing. These other factors could be practical considerations such as work schedules, or the necessity of protecting “the child from physical and psychological harm through abuse, neglect or alienation of parental affection.”

This bill specifically directs judges to take these considerations into account. Kelowna lawyer Meg Shaw was way off the mark when she suggested that this bill would somehow diminish the protection children might receive when required. In fact, it would have the opposite effect.

Federal justice ministers for many years have been quoted as dismissing parental rights as either nonexistent or minimal (re: Martin Cauchon’s oft repeated 2002 statement of “Parents have responsibilities, they don’t have rights”). Putting the best interests of the child is not in any way in conflict with parents having rights and responsibilities. We all know that having responsibilities entails having the power to perform them, thus the necessity for parental rights.

Children in single-parent families more likely to suffer emotional problems, report finds

Children from broken homes are almost five times more likely to develop emotional problems than those living with both parents, a report has found.

Young people whose mother and father split up are also three times as likely to become aggressive or badly behaved, according to the comprehensive survey carried out by the Office for National Statistics.

Living in a “reconstituted” family containing step-children or step-parents increased the risk of developing behavioural problems still further, it found.

The stark findings of the study, commissioned by the Department for Health and the Scottish Government, fly in the face of the Government’s repeated failure to extol the benefits on children of growing up in a traditional family home.

Under Labour, the number of couples getting married has fallen to the lowest level for more than a century while almost half of newlyweds are now expected to end up divorcing.

Yet Harriet Harman, the party’s deputy leader, insisted recently that “there is no ‘ideal’ parenting scenario” and “marriage has little relevance to public policy”.

The ONS report involved interviewing parents, teacher and children themselves to find out how many suffered emotional problems such as anxiety or depression, how many had “conduct disorders” such as aggression, and what the possible reasons behind them were.

After interviewing 5,364 children aged between five and 16 in 2004 and again last year, the researchers found that 3 per cent had developed problems over that time. In addition, 30 per cent who had emotional problems at the first survey, and 43 per cent who had behavioural issues, still had them three years later.

The researchers stressed they had not discovered any direct causes of emotional and behavioural problems developing or persisting in children, but agreed there was a link to living in a broken home.

Children whose parents had split up over the three years were 4.53 times more likely to develop emotional problems than those whose mothers and fathers stayed together, and were 2.87 times more likely to show the onset of behavioural disorders.

The report said: “The odds of developing an emotional disorder were increased for children where there had been a change in the number of parents between surveys, from two parents to one parent compared with children and young people in families that had two parents at both times.”

It went on: “Children and young people in households of ‘reconstituted’ families, particularly where there were step-children, were more likely to develop conduct disorder as were those in families which had two parents at Time 1 and one parent at Time 2.”

In addition, children whose mothers were mentally ill were found to be more likely to develop conduct disorders, as were those whose mothers were poorly educated.

Children who endured three stressful events such as seeing one’s parents divorce or appear in court, or suffering a serious disease or being badly injured, were three times as likely to develop emotional problems.

However those who were happy where they lived, had lots of friends or enjoyed activities outside school were less likely to become unhappy.

The report’s author, Nina Parry-Langdon, said: “If children belong to more clubs, it may offer some protection against getting a disorder in the future.”

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